I assume most people have seen the movie, "Pay It Forward." If you haven't then the basic idea is if something good is done for you, pay it forward to someone else. This is my Gout moment of paying it forward. This will probably be a long note but as I sit down to write this and pay it forward, somebody reading this will become Gout Free this year and stay Gout Free.

I had just turned 40 and I had not only suffered my first Gout attack but I was suffering a new Gout attack every couple of months to the point that I almost had a perpetual feeling that Gout was sleeping in my left Big Toe Joint ready to wake up if I disturbed it in anyway. It had basically moved in for good. Furthermore, it was beginning to change my social life. My normal crowd of sport loving, beer drinking friends were growing tired of my absence or worse substituting post game beers for cherry juice (which does not work by the way.)

I went the Doctor route, did hours of research on-line, discovered my family history of Gout dating back to my Irish-Immigrant grandparents that had Gout. In fact my entire Irish-American ancestry....aunts, uncles, cousins all had Gout in the family.

And after all of that research and debating doctors as to the treatment course, my wife was sitting on a baseball field with another woman who had similar family history of Gout. She said to my wife, before he starts taking All-Purinol for the rest of his life; have him get tested for hemachromotosis. Your doctor can give you a serum-ferritin test to get a positive diagnosis on hemachromotosis. There is also plenty of organizations that can help you understand it better.

After another few months of near gout attacks and having my older brother diagnosed with another ailment that could be allegedly caused by hemachromotosis, I finally gave in to my wife and got tested. Sure enough I had a very high level of ferritin in my blood which indicates a super high level of iron in my body.

So here is the "Ah-Ha" moment. Gout is a symptom of something else in your body. It's an inflammation. It's not the primary disease. It probably took a lifetime (or 40 years) to develop in the form of your body storing iron to create the symptoms. The underlying ailment for a lot of you reading this is hemachromotosis. GET TESTED! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.

And here is the best news. If your underlying ailment is hemachromotosis all you have to do is give blood to reduce the iron stores in your body and begin to leech the iron out of your joints and back out through your bloodstream. For me, that required me to give blood more than the recommended 56 day waiting period governed by American Red Cross in order to bring my iron levels down. Make sure you do this under the consent of your doctor during the initial period. After that, the maintenance is to give blood every 56 days in order to keep the iron in your body from being deposited in your joints and organs. On a side note, hemachromotosis can cause a variety of other nasty things.

The end result for me is that after 3 years of getting my ferritin levels in check by donating blood. I have not had a single gout attack nor does it lie sleeping in my big toe waiting to erupt. Thank God my wife ran into that lady on the ball field because it changed my life forever when she described her family history of Gout and how they treat it in their family. I hope I have now Paid It Forward.

One last item that was a cool realization for me. I described my family history of Gout. Everyone of my family members that I have told my story to and the few non-stubborn people that got a serum-ferritin test; all came back positive for Hemachromotosis. The one person in my family that avoided the family curse of Gout was my mother. All of her sisters and brothers have battled Gout for 20 years. Ironically, she was a nurse for the past 30 years and participated in the Hospital blood drive several times a year over the past 30 years. Wouldn't you know, she is the only one out of her siblings that never had Gout.

Pay It Forward.