I just found this board today. I was looking b/c I am particulary down today. Your post about your daughter is so similar to my daughter Anna. She was diagnosed one year ago at 23 months old. She started with her knees and has had several injections. They seem to work for about 3 months and then she needs another. It then went to her fingers and she cannot bend many of them. She has been on naproxen since diagnosis and 8 weeks ago they began mtx orally (is that the right abbrev?) to try and get the fingers back to normal. At her appt yesterday they determined it was not working and we need to either increase the mtx and give via sub-cue injection (once /wk) or keep mtx oral and add embryl which is injected via sub-cue twice per week. I am so distressed that she will have to be given these shots once or twice per week for who knows how long that I almost haven't been able to stop crying since I found out. Then after that appt I went to the eye doctor who indicated she would probably need to get glasses in 3 months to protect against a lazy eye (since one is stronger than the other) and if that didnt work she'd need a patch over her eye. It was like the straw that broke the camels back - I kept thinking not only can she not live a normal healthy life with all this medication and swelling, but now she also can't even LOOK like a healthy child. It seems so silly that glasses/a patch would make me feel this way but coming on top of everything else, it just did. I can barely think or talk of this stuff right now without crying. I know exactly how you feel. Sometimes I can make myself feel better by thinking of how much worse it would be if she had some horrible terminal disease, and that we are lucky to only have JRA. But when I am in the thick of it, like right now, it is hard to be comforted by this when I know that regardless of how much worse it could be, this isn't what I want for my precious daughter. Quite rambling, I know, but when I read your post my heart just went out to you. I know just how you feel. I hope your daugher gets to take the mtx orally and that it works for her.
