Moving Day with Axial Spondyloarthritis

My wife, Stacia, and I have moved around a bit in the past decade, moving from Massachusetts to Texas to New Mexico and now to Colorado. With all of the excitement of moving to a new location also comes the stress of the actual move, including finding a place to live, packing up all of the stuff of our life, and getting all those things to the new home.

Honestly, I can be cheap sometimes. I don’t like paying for something that I can do myself. But with axial spondyloarthritis, I’ve had to re-evaluate what I actually can do myself when it comes to both daily tasks and more major and rare projects.

Admitting my limitations

When we moved from Massachusetts to Texas and from Texas to New Mexico, Stacia and I, along with family members, did all the work of moving ourselves. That includes all the heavy lifting that comes with packing and unpacking the moving truck.

I didn’t, and still stubbornly don’t, like to hire movers to pack and unpack a truck. But now I know that hiring movers to lift our furniture and all of our heavy boxes (I’m a bit of a bibliophile and drag lots of books around with us from state to state) is necessary.

For our most recent move, I’ve learned a bit more about my body with axial spondyloarthritis and know enough to realize that a day or two of lifting and carrying will lead to days or weeks of recovery time. It’s not worth it. As with most other things, I’ve learned the importance of admitting my limitations, while still doing as much as I can reasonably do.

Bending, lifting, twisting

This time around, I stuck to packing and only carrying the lighter items. But regardless of how cautious I was, axial spondyloarthritis found a way to make its presence known. On day one of two long weeks of packing up our old apartment, what started as a little lower back soreness grew continually worse until I had trouble moving from a sitting to standing position. Standing in one place for more than a few seconds left me with agonizing back pain.

I wasn’t lifting heavy boxes or furniture this time, I was simply packing up my small library of books. But packing up the books required repetitive motions of bending over, twisting from side to side, and continually moving from a kneeling to a standing position. For some reason, these combinations of movements irritated the joints in my lower back, leading to pain and inflammation that stuck around for the remaining two weeks.

Recovery days

By the time our moving weekend arrived, my back was already in rough shape, I was exhausted by the long days of packing, and relying on a low dose of prednisone to keep my inflammation in check. One of the only things keeping me going was the thought of several recovery days ahead.

When I accepted the new position that prompted this most recent move, I insisted on securing a week off in between jobs to rest and recover. I know my body with this disease (fairly well anyway) and I know the importance of rest. To start a new job only a day or two after a big move would have been setting myself up for failure. My mind may have been ready, but my body would not have been.

Even with all precautions in place, with my wife’s insistence that I not lift or carry anything heavy, with my own determination to pace myself and be careful, AxSpA weaseled its way into this move.

But that’s how this thing works. I cannot always predict how my disease will affect me during daily tasks or major projects. But one thing is for certain: AxSpA will be there, an unwelcome companion, making the task at hand that much more difficult.