The cursor blinked, mocking. The question, stark and innocent, hung in the digital air of the online forum: ‘Can this be cured?’ I watched it, not just on my screen, but as if it were etched into the very silence of the room around me. For 19 excruciating seconds, no one replied. Then 49 seconds. Then a full minute and 9 seconds. The veteran members of the rheumatoid arthritis support group knew. They knew the question was a trap, a landmine of hopes detonated too many times to count.
They knew because they’d asked it too. Many years ago, when the first symptoms-the swollen knuckles, the morning stiffness, the insidious fatigue-had stolen into their lives like an uninvited guest, they’d demanded answers. ‘Cure me,’ the unspoken plea had echoed in countless doctor’s offices. The promise of eradication, of a return to a pre-illness state, is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that anything less feels like a personal failure, a medical shortcoming. We’ve been conditioned by tales of infectious diseases vanquished, of cancers put into deep remission, of problems that, once identified, can be surgically removed or chemically annihilated. But chronic illness? That’s a different beast entirely. It doesn’t follow the script.
