Daily Lupus Awareness Fact of the Day! |

Hello, I hope everyone is doing great and being safe out there as Kentucky starts to open up businesses for the economy. I had surgery on Wednesday that went well. I will go into more detail in the next post about it. Today being that it’s Lupus Awareness month, I feel that it is appropriate to publish one Lupus fact for every day, starting today. A lot of people still don’t know what lupus is and by posting about it I will be educating and hopefully we can get some funding going towards Lupus research and be on the track to find a cure.

Well I guess here goes. 1st we are going to identify Lupus. What is Lupus? It is an autoimmune disease. The best analogy I have heard when explaining what lupus is: You know how when you catch a cold or the flu you have antibodies that attack the cold and flu invaders, however with Lupus our antibodies can’t tell who is good and who is bad so it destroys them all. Killing good cells and tissues right along with the bad. Lupus effects everyone differently. There are no 2 identical Lupus patients. I have a friend that also has Lupus and it affects her kidneys. For the time being, I have no kidney involvement.

There are 4 different types of Lupus. Systemic Lupus affects internal organs, heart, lungs, blood, joints, muscles, etc. I have systemic Lupus. Lupus attacks my blood, skin, lungs, and muscles, and joints. And recently its caused me to develop other diseases like Gastroparesis which is autoimmune but its where food doesn’t move in your stomach at a normal pace. Normal cases of Gastroparesis are diabetic related. Mine is idiopathic which means they (doctors) don’t know why I have it.

Cutaneous or Discoid Lupus deals with the skin. I have Discoid Lupus as well. I cannot be in direct sunlight for long periods of time or it totally drains me. I don’t get the skin lesions but I do get fatigued quite easily when in direct sunlight longer than 10-15 minutes.