I was 15 when I noticed the popping and cracking coming from my joints. The stiffness, especially in my knees, followed not long after, and it's only gotten worse since. Getting up from a kneeling position was painful and difficult by my late 20s. It was frustrating.
After my first, painful winter in Pennsylvania—where I had to go upstairs backwards, on my ass, because I couldn't lift my right leg—I went to the doctor.
Osteoarthritis.
She asked me if I played sports as a kid.
"Nope."
"It's good that you didn't."
When my x-rays came back, though, it was good news: it turned out that none of my joints were bad enough to require any type of special medical treatment. Prednisone gives me bad side effects, so I was instructed to take a maximum of 2400mg of ibuprofen a day (up to 800mg a time) for no more than two weeks, during flare-ups. And get a knee brace.
I love my knee brace.
The frustrating thing about wearing a brace isn't its existence, it's others' reaction to it. Old men at the gym ask "What happened to your knee?", I respond "I have early onset osteoarthritis", and they say "You're too young for that." This pisses me off.
"You have a conversation with my fucking body then," I said to one guy. "Explain to it that it's too young for osteoarthritis." I love my knee brace. I hate the fact that I have to use it, but I love it because I've spent the last five years with osteoarthritis, I'm lucky that it hasn't gotten bad enough to warrant hardcore treatment, and the knee brace makes it OK. Of all the brands I've tried, the DonJoy OA Lite Osteoarthritis Knee Brace is the one that works for me, good for "active daily living" and the gym, thanks to it being both high-quality and lightweight. It's durable, too: one one you see in the photo above is five years old and often worn daily. It's not cheap. I've reached a point where I qualify for steroid injections, and am needing the brace less often as a result. But it's still a necessity on leg day. 
