Episode 47 - Advocacy Queen At Fourteen

Devyn Nichols, a 14 year old content creator for Take a Pain Check, comes onto the podcast to discuss her diagnosis with undifferentiated Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. When talking about Devyn’s diagnosis journey, she brings up medical gaslighting to which led to her seeing many family doctors and rheumatologists. Natasha and Devyn discuss side effects they’ve experienced on Methotrexate and Prednisone, as well the insecurities that came alongside being teenage girls. Not only that, Devyn explains the struggle of having peers and school faculty not understanding that arthritis fluctuates, appointments can’t be on weekends and it's not “just joints that are sore sometimes but will go away”. From a young age, gymnastics was Devyn’s dream but soon after being diagnosed with arthritis she came to a realization that she had to let it go. With that in mind, Devyn mentions that letting go opened up a whole new world for her. Finally, they end the episode talking about Devyn becoming an arthritis advocate and discussing her involvement with Take a Pain Check, as well as her personal Instagram account @devs_jia_journey.  

5 minute video explaining JIA:  https://www.instagram.com/p/CTxoNO4g_DS/ 

Check out our socials: 

Website: https://www.takeapaincheck.ca/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/takeapainch... 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/takeapaincheck​​​

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@takeapaincheck 

Devyn's socials: Instagram: devyn_nicholsss, devs_jia_journey  Tik-Tok: devyn_nichols   

Growing Pains, Copyright, 2018, Alessia Cara