Conquering the Wolf - Fighting Lupus One Symptom at a Time

It’s the second half and the players are getting tired. The cheerleaders keep cheering them on as they pass the basketball left to right hoping to get the three point shot to win the game. I’m sitting on the second row of the stands, waiting in anticipation for my favorite cheer to begin. The girls start pumping their arms. I’m smiling and clapping with them, most specifically for my friend, the captain of the team, as she goes for her jump. She lands a little wrong but its ok, right? We realize that she’s hurt her knee and won’t be able to cheer anymore that night. It was ok though. Our team lost anyway.

The overprotective friend that I was that Junior Year in High School, I was concerned that her doctor, who had seen her for her knee, had requested more tests. Why would you test a sprained knee? Why would anyone think twice about it? Because on that night that she fatefully hurt herself, she opened the doors to her impending fate: She was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).

‘Sixteen year olds don’t get Lupus.’ ‘Old people get Lupus.’ ‘Don’t touch her!’ ‘She’s got Lupus!’ ‘What’s Lupus? Is that like AIDS?’ I watched her slide the slippery slope of the horrible genetic disease with which there was no cure, and listened to the ignorant questions whispered in the halls. No one wanted to touch her in fear they would get what she had. AIDS was still a new thing for us in the small town we lived in and no one had heard of Lupus. No one knew that it was a chronic inflammatory disease that developed (reasons unknown) when the immune system attacked its own body’s tissues and organs. We soon found what an aggressive disease it was when it targeted her joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells heart and lungs. She had her ups and downs, and over the years I watched her suffer Arthritis, Rheumatism, extreme fatigue, Shingles, kidney failure, hair loss, severe rash, and any other ailment a person’s vanity could not endure.