105 degrees and you're bundled up like its a snow storm

The sad thing about RA/ Fibro/ or any chronic illness is that it doesn't travel alone. You often find that once you have one, you start to pile them one like links in a chain. Raynaud's syndrome is common to have as a Spoonie. Raynaud's is "the inability to regulate your body's temperature correctly (my definition)." So when you get hot....you literally start to boil over, headaches, severe redness, and severe swelling. When you get cold, you get a frost bite feeling very quickly, numbness, stabbing feeling in your finger and toes. And heaven forbid that you go from one extreme to the next very quickly. The pain, the flu like symptoms, the chills...torture. I give this background because people often don't understand why I have on a scarf in the summer, or why I wear a jacket year round. Sometimes it's just easier to look funny than to explain it over and over again. Most importantly, it's about my survival. If I know that I will be going in and out of different temperature rooms, I just dress warm. Sure, the chance of me getting sick is higher...but the pain of temperature change is worse than an upper respiratory infection. Learning which way to tip the scale is the key to survival.