I Graduated With a 3.88 GPA While Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis in College. Here’s What That Actually Cost Me.
I woke up one summer morning with a swollen ankle and no memory of falling.
It looked like a bad sprain. It felt like one too, except nothing had gone wrong. I hadn’t rolled it, hadn’t tripped, hadn’t done anything except go to sleep and wake up with a foot that decided today was the day to cause mayhem.
I was nineteen. I was home from college on summer break, working at Walmart, I’d worked there through high school, and they’d hire me back every summer, so it was familiar, easy money while I was home. I wrapped my ankle, went to work, and figured it would resolve on its own; the way these things usually do.
It didn’t.
For two weeks, I did the same routine. Work my shift, come home, put my foot up, ice it, wait. It stayed swollen. It stayed warm. My parents finally said what I’d been stubbornly ignoring: that enough time had passed that this wasn’t going to fix itself.
My doctor took one look and said: This isn’t a sprain. The redness, the warmth, the swelling in the joint, that’s inflammation. That’s not a mechanical injury. She ran blood tests and said she suspected rheumatoid arthritis or another autoimmune condition.
The blood tests came back positive. She said false positives happen quite frequently and that I’d need to see a rheumatologist to confirm. Well, it was confirmed.
People around me reacted as if the diagnosis was a death sentence.
I didn’t understand why.
I was nineteen. RA was a word on a piece of paper. I had places to be.
The Limitation I Couldn’t See Yet
Looking back now, I understand what my parents saw that I couldn’t. They knew something about long-term illness that I didn’t, that it compounds, that it changes things slowly and then all at once, that level of sustainability shortens extensively.
But I wasn’t looking that far ahead. I was just looking at the fall semester.
I went back to school carrying a diagnosis I hadn’t fully processed and a course load that most people would consider ambitious on a healthy body. Eighteen credits, one semester, I managed twenty-one. I treated my RA as background noise or an inconvenience, especially when I would need to study in bed because of the pain. Something to manage around the edges of the actual life I was living.
The grades didn’t suffer. The GPA held. From the outside, I was fine.
From the inside, I was running on something closer to stubbornness than stamina. There were days when getting through class felt like a physical act of will. Days when the brain fog, that particular RA symptom nobody warned me about, the one where thinking clearly requires effort that healthy people spend on other things, made lectures feel like they were happening underwater. Days when my joints hurt badly enough that sitting or standing was its own kind of work.
I pushed through. I always pushed through. That was the only setting I knew.
The Senior Year Reckoning
My senior year, I had clinic hours to fulfill, and this was the first time in my life when I had the thought, “I can’t do this.”
I couldn’t fully argue my way out of what RA actually meant. Not in theory. Not as a word on a blood test. But as a real, physical limitation on what I could sustain. But I still didn’t quite believe it. I just told myself that I was just being lazy, or I needed to take a break and recharge.
By graduation, though, I knew that the traditional job path would be hard for me. The one with fixed schedules and performance expectations that don’t bend for flare cycles, it wasn’t going to work for me. Not permanently. Not without a cost.
What the GPA Actually Proves
A 3.88 GPA across four years of 18-21 credit semesters with rheumatoid arthritis is not a testament to how manageable the disease is.
It’s a testament to how much I was willing to ignore in order to perform.
I’m not saying it with regret. The degree mattered. The work mattered. But I want to be honest about what it actually represented, because I think a lot of people with chronic illness collect achievements the same way, as proof that they’re okay, that the diagnosis isn’t limiting them, that they’re still capable.
Capable was never the question. I was always capable.
The question was: capable at what cost, and for how long?
I didn’t know the answer to that in college. I learned it in increments over the next ten years, in ways that were sometimes gentle and sometimes not gentle at all.
What I know now is that I eventually built something different out of necessity. A business designed not around my best days but the worst of them. That business exists, in part, because of what RA forced me to understand about sustainability, about systems, about the limits of pushing through as a long-term strategy.
But I didn’t know any of that yet.
At nineteen, I just wrapped my ankle and went to work.
Have you been diagnosed with RA or another chronic illness? Did the understanding come all at once or in layers, the way it did for me? I’d love to hear your experience.
