Walk to Cure Arthritis May 22 at Boyce Park in Plum

While the debilitating effects of arthritis most commonly are associated with aging, consider what happened to Allie McGinnis when she was just 5.

“I fell at a bowling alley, and my arm, it was stuck at a 90-degree angle. It wouldn’t move. My joints were so stiff that my arm wouldn’t straighten back out,” she said.

The diagnosis was juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a form that affects the autoimmune system. Since then, McGinnis has attempted to manage the symptoms while leading as normal of a life as possible.

Now a senior at Blackhawk High School in Beaver Country, she also has worked with the Arthritis Foundation Western Pennsylvania toward helping others who face similar circumstances.

In acknowledgment of her efforts, she has been named young adult honoree for the 2022 Walk to Cure Arthritis, scheduled for May 22 at the Boyce Park Four Seasons Activity Center/Ski Lodge in Plum. Also recognized are adult honoree Matthew Wohlfarth of Coraopolis and Dr. Matthew Flanagan, an Allegheny Health Network sports medicine specialist, as medical honoree.

For McGinnis, offering support and raising money on behalf of the Arthritis Foundation started after she learned about its mission.

“I didn’t ever really think about getting involved, because I was so used to having arthritis. It’s just been like a normal thing for me,” she said. “So it was kind of like a home, like a family, a place where other people kind of understood what was going on.”

Wohlfarth has two decades’ worth of understanding in the wake of his symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis cropping up while he was on the road as a working standup comic.

“In between shows, my joints started freezing up. My feet felt like they had razor blades in them. My elbow would freeze up, so I had to switch hands with the mic,” he said. “And then I came home and I’d wake up, and I couldn’t walk. My girlfriend at the time said, ‘You’ve got to get that checked. That’s not normal at 34.’ So I went and got checked, and I tested positive.”

The diagnosis curtailed his touring schedule, and he subsequently has contended with the effects of a disease that afflicts some 58.5 million Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“In general, arthritis is going to be characterized by pain, stiffness and inflammation of all the joints that are involved,” Flanagan said. “There’s not a lot of mortality associated with this. But it is a very significant quality-of-life issue.”

He normally treats patients with osteoarthritis, the degenerative form of the disease, and often hears attestations to the effect of “I can’t get down on the floor to play with my grandkids anymore” or “I just don’t get enjoyment out of the things I normally would do because of the pain.”

That also applies to relatively young people like McGinnis, who sometimes would have difficulties in her role as a cheerleader, for example. Then there was the aspect of treatment, starting with injections of the Immunosuppressive drug methotrexate.

“And I hated needles, because I was little. I didn’t want to get a shot,” she said. “Then they tried the pill form, and that made me nauseous. I woke up every Saturday morning, and all of my friends were outside playing. And I was just sick. I didn’t want to go outside. I had to watch all my friends play.”

Eventually, the similar medication adalimumab worked better, until she was taken off it temporarily to determine if her arthritis had subsided.

“But for some reason, my eye would flare up,” McGinnis said, as it also turned out she has uveitis, inflammation of the middle layer of tissue in the eye wall. “So I was constantly on and off eye drops, too.”

Then came the covid pandemic, and with her immune system being compromised, she was unable to have much contact with anyone besides her family members, until she was vaccinated.

Wohlfarth wasn’t exceptionally old, either, when he started treatment in what he admits was a sporadic manner.

“I wasn’t a very good patient,” he said. “What happens is, you get on medicine, and then you feel good and you stop taking the medicine. And it comes back double.”

He has adjusted over the years, though, and is writing a book called “Chronic: How to Live With a Disease That’s Never Going Away.”

“I’m not playing it as a martyr, because there are certainly a lot of people who are going through worse things than I,” Wohlfarth said. “But it’s just something you have to deal with on a daily basis.”

Meanwhile, he has continued his comedy as a part-time pursuit and is organizing a show, targeted for the fall, to benefit the Arthritis Foundation.

Also in the fall, McGinnis will begin studying nursing at St. Francis University in Cambria County, with the eventual goal of working at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

“That’s where I was my whole life, so I feel like that’s where I should be,” she said. “I just went for checkups, and going there when I was little, I didn’t understand that people stayed overnight. I was like, ‘Mom, why are all these kids staying overnight?’ They had actual issues. Not to make mine not seem important, but I want to give back.”

For more information about the 2022 Walk to Cure Arthritis, visit events.arthritis.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.event&eventID=1354.