At 46, Annique is a mother of two under 4-year-old. Like any parent, they keep her on her toes from morning to night, but that comes with unique challenges due to her inflammatory arthritis diagnosis, which she had lived with for most of her life.
She was 12 when she was first diagnosed with juvenile arthritis. What followed was a long and complicated road: a misdiagnosis that wasn’t untangled until her 30s, then identified as ankylosing spondylitis, and recently also psoriatic arthritis. “I’m quite a complicated case. I hear that often,” she says.
For much of her childhood, the condition was manageable. The last ten years have been harder. Today, arthritis shapes the smallest moments of her day. “It’s a constant battle of fatigue and pain,” she explains. Picking up her baby, sitting on the floor to play, not being able to run around and play with her kids, standing for long stretches. These are the things many parents never think twice about but have become daily hurdles. “I would love to go for walks along the beach or go camping with my family,” she adds. “But basically, anything physical, I am limited with what I can do.”
What people don’t see is often the hardest part. “I feel that with arthritis it’s not just sore joints. It’s your wellbeing. It really affects your mental load.” Like many living with a chronic, invisible illness, Annique tends to hide her pain, and carries guilt over the blood tests, scans and operations that have pulled her away from her work and her family.
Arthritis took things from her early on, too. A keen ballet dancer as a child, she had to stop when the pain in her knees set in. Sport was off the table. “I could never be a runner.”
Yet her outlook is positive. “Arthritis has shaped me, but it hasn’t defined me,” she says. She has built a career, become a mother, and now lends her voice to Arthritis Australia’s Consumer Advisory Panel, helping shape research and advocacy through lived experience.
Her hope is simple: more research, better understanding, and an end to the stigma that arthritis is only “an old person’s disease”, when it affects children and young adults too.
Most of all, she dreams of a future with less pain, for herself and the generations to come. “I wish I could sit down and play with my kids. I wish I could hold them for longer than two minutes.” A treatment that could take her pain away, she says, “would be a game changer. It would mean the world to me.”