When I was growing up, I watched I Love Lucy religiously. She was my favorite for she made me laugh despite everything I was going through - like living with juvenile arthritis like 300,000 other children in the United States.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned Lucille Ball and I had something major in common - an illness. As a chorus girl early in her career, she had an onset of rheumatoid arthritis. Her first major flare up (episode) with it wound up sidetracking her career. She was given experimental treatments that didn't work and was forced to move back in with her parents. During this time, she was in bed for nearly two years. Her mother was caring but her father seemed to lecture her often about her illness and needing to watch after herself better - something that those of us with these diseases face every day from our support systems.

Due to this first flare up, she ended up having to relearn how to walk. During I Love Lucy and other productions, she wore special shoes with weights in them and tried to make sure her legs were covered more often than not so that others wouldn't see the changes in leg length or that her left leg had begun to turn sideways.

I'm sure that later flare ups were unkind to her body as well.

Hattie Carnegie had kept Lucy on throughout the entire ordeal, giving Lucy the ability to jump back into modeling after the initial flare up subsided. There wouldn't be a way for her to go back to being a chorus girl though.

Despite 1 in every 5 adults in the United States having some type of arthritis, there is still a misconception that it is only in the bones, causing aches and pains.

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a type of autoimmune based arthritis, meaning that instead of dealing only with bones as osteoarthritis due to old age, it attacks every part of the body from the eyes to the heart to the skin and more. RA (and related diseases like lupus, juvenile arthritis, still's disease, and more) can cause all sorts of damage more than just daily and debilitating pain, from deformities in the joints as Lucy lived with to blindness and even death.

Lucy has served as an example and an idol to so many, but especially to those of us living with various forms of inflammatory or autoimmune arthritis. On a personal level, she has influenced so many aspects of my life from my hair color occasionally to my poise to persevering with arthritis. There is very little exposure of her struggle - and the struggles of others - with arthritis.

It would mean the world to me and to so many if you could use your upcoming biopic on Lucy to have Cate Blanchett share with the world how difficult it can be to deal with RA.