But she pushed through. Refusing to use a walker or a cane at school as she didn’t want the kids to see her like that, she would roll around class on her rolly chair and walk around school with an umbrella as a cane. The only narcotic medication she ever took that I can recall was on my wedding day, so she could do the Macarena (yes, I’ve been married THAT long).

Finally she had a hip replacement, and boy was she zooming all over the place! “Can you do the rest of me?” she asked the orthopedic surgeon.

Actually they were planning on eventually doing her other hip and probably her knees, but a brain aneurysm took her life at 48, and on June 8 of this year, I will have been 15 years without my mother, one of the strongest, most amazing people I’ve ever met.

Ironically, I believe since RA is a connective tissue disease (along with the hypertension she suffered due to the long-standing prednisone use), the disease did actually play a large factor in her death. Her pain was over, though.

My own personal struggles with pain began in 2005. Not wanting to have a baby during med school since my husband and I lived apart all those years, I was on some type of hormonal contraception, and had been for almost 10 years.

Midway through my third year, I went off the patch. The next month, I had the “worst headache of my life.”

My husband happened to be there, and I was vomiting no matter what I tried to take: ibuprofen, Tylenol, Percocet left over from a surgery I’d had. Petrified after watching my mother die of pretty much the exact thing, he rushed me to the emergency department.

A CT scan, a lumbar puncture, Reglan and some fluids later, I was feeling better. Ironically, I was on my neurology rotation and ended up with a post-LP headache.

One of my attendings sent me to the clinic for some triptans, and then diagnosed me with my first migraine.

We all know those people, too. “I have migraines, and I’m allergic to everything under the sun, including the sun, which is why the sun’s reflection off the moon bothers my eyes so much that in the dark, I have to wear these sunglasses even in the dead of night …” Who do you think you are? Corey Hart?