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Fictional Personas for Rheumatoid Arthritis: Asif Siddiqi

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Persona: Image  from Pixabay

Personas are a design tool used to help designers focus their design for the real goals of real people. They are detailed fictional descriptions of people, their lives, and goals. These personas are to help design for people with rheumatoid arthritis. Find out more.

Asif Siddiqi

Asif is fairly newly diagnosed and still coming to terms with the disease. He has bouts of depression especially as he struggled to see how he will cope long term, though things are starting to look up as the medication finally starts to work.

  • Age 47, Male, married with 3 daughters
  • Owns private cab business
  • Recently diagnosed
  • Suffers bouts of depression
  • Increasing bouts of tiredness
  • Bad side effects
  • Taking biologic drugs

Asif is aged 47, and is married with three teenage daughters. He has always been very self-reliant. He owns and runs a successful private cab business which he set up. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis less than a year ago and is still coming to terms with it. It was a shock and felt at first like a lifelong sentence of pain and helplessness. He would still like it all to be a bad dream he can wake up from.

The pain was often really bad, and sometimes unbearable at the start. He woke up in the night with pains shooting through his feet and hands. He still has good days and bad days, but there seems to be no pattern. He can go to bed feeling things are a bit better and then be hit badly by it the next day.

He has been seeing the specialist every few weeks or so. He was on a high dosage of drugs: the specialist told him that early aggressive treatment was important, but the first drugs gave him other problems from side effects. They hit him hard, with constant stomach upsets and feeling sick. He was not sure the drugs make a difference anyway. The Doctor seemed to eventually agree as he has now been given a new drug that he has to inject. It eventually started to work: as a result he thinks he has started to notice less pain and stiffness day to day now.

He is still getting used to the idea of giving himself injections. He was horrified when he found that he was expected to inject himself. He was shown once by a nurse and thought he had understood, but then couldn’t remember exactly how to do it the first time he did it on his own. His hand was shaking so much he had to stop and try again later. He was glad no-one saw him. He then didn’t think he had done it quite the way he was supposed to several subsequent times, and was worrying about getting it right. In the days before taking the injection it was at the back of his mind and made it hard to concentrate on other things. Eventually, he started to get used to it, but then got it wrong again and lost confidence for a while, so kept putting it off, even though he knew he should do it.

He has to take a whole series of different tablets too, both for arthritis and for other things. They seem to be helping now, but they all come with rules of how often and when. For example, he has to take folic acid tablets as apparently that counteracts some problem the main drug might cause. However, he isn’t to take them on the same day as that arthritis drugs… it is very easy to get confused about what he has taken and what he is or isn’t supposed to do especially given his brain is foggy at times now.

He is also not sure if he is looking after the drugs properly, which he was told was important. They get pushed to the back of the fridge, for example, and then those at the back are far colder than at the front, sometimes even frozen. He also got distracted once as the telephone rang just as they had been delivered so he put them on the dining room table while he answered the phone. He then forgot he hadn’t put them in the fridge. The box was in the sun for hours and then he wasn’t sure what to do. He just put it in the fridge and hoped it was ok.

He has been told to avoid being in contact with people with severe infections as if he caught something like that it could be really bad for him. He has to make sure friends or other visitors know not to come near if they think they might have caught something.

He knows he should be doing more exercise, but it’s all just too much for him. He does exercises he was shown every so often, but for days just ignores them completely. It seems futile and he worries its making him worse.

Since getting rheumatoid arthritis he has become unbelievably tired at times. This comes from nowhere and happens even when he had a good night’s sleep. He can have just been doing normal things and suddenly it’s as though he just ran a marathon. He then finds it hard to carry on at work. He gets the impression hiis GP doesn’t seem to think the tiredness is related to arthritis, or at least Asif has the impression he doesn’t want to hear about it.

He has had bouts of very low mood when the future just seems bleak. He was very worried that he would quickly be unable to work and then what would happen to his family? The way the medication seems to have started to work has relieved that worry a little. He still worries he will become totally reliant on others eventually, when he has always been proud of his self-reliance, especially in growing his business from nothing. He finds it really hard to talk to his family about the problems and especially how he feels. He has noticed he now gets angry with them about little things, and then is deeply upset about having been angry. At least there are now glimmers of hope things will get better than now rather than just worse.

Personal Goals

  • To feel he is definitely coping.
  • To overcome tiredness and be in less pain

Practical Goals

  • To continue to run his business.
  • To see a tangible improvement in his condition with less severe side effects.
  • To be sure he is properly looking after the drugs.
  • To take the drugs when he is supposed to.