My First Lupus Flare

Last summer was hell.  I'll be honest.  I was so miserable, that if I was a suicidal person I would have ended it all. For the record, I am way to stubborn for that kind of action.

I had no idea what was causing my symptoms, every doctors visit left me angry and helpless. My blood work was inconclusive to my general practitioner.  The one ray of hope was that she did listen to me, she never wrote me off as being a hypochondriac.

After exhausting all our options (and taking copious documentation) she sent me to the rheumatologist.  He ran his tests compared them to my previous blood work and started connecting dots.  Then started me on Plaquenil. So far, I haven't felt as crappy as last summer.

Why do I revisit that time?  Because I realized that I was living through a 'flare'.  A long, vicious, difficult flare. The conclusion is, I'd really like to avoid them as much as possible. please.

My other great enlightenment is that Lupus is a highly personal disease, yet, to get the funding need the LFA needs to try to standardize it.  Which I do understand.  The LFA blog just published an interesting article regarding how the result of a 4-year international study has just defined what a Lupus Flare is:

A flare is a measurable increase in disease activity in one or more organ systems involving new or worse clinical signs and symptoms and/or lab measurements. It must be considered clinically significant by the assessor and usually there would be at least consideration of a change or an increase in treatment.

I have to give the research teams credit for keeping it as flexible as possible to take in account the individuals that suffer from this disease.

I'm still figuring out my limitations with this new circumstance in my life.  I often push myself to hard and far.  Honestly, I'm stubborn.  I have work to do, goals to achieve and an awful lot of life to live.