Diagnosis

I went to my doctor on January 12th first thing in the morning. My doctor, after hearing from the nurse of my complaints and reason for my visit, can hurriedly in and said “Emily, you sound miserable”. And that described it perfectly. After the appointment, who knows how many vials of blood and x-rays, I left not knowing what was wrong but with a prescription for steroids.

I took them the next day and within 12 hours I noticed a difference. That night I didn’t start to stiffen up as I usually did. I remember being at spin class and I kept moving my wrists and hands and thinking, wow, they aren’t killing me. I hadn't realized I was so swollen everywhere (thought I put on a few pounds over the holiday) but I lost 5 pounds in that first week as the swelling reduced!

The next week was a trip to the rheumatologist and then the diagnosis of Lupus.

Of course, with my brother being a doctor and all the info on the web, at that point I really thought I had Rheumatoid Arthritis (which is bad). So when the Lupus diagnosis came, I almost laughed. I really didn’t think I had that when I read about it, mostly because I didn’t have the typical butterfly rash. I continued treatment. The steroids left me flat all winter, no emotion but no pain either. I felt better once I started to taper off of them in late March.

As I began to tell people about it, I did receive everyone’s opinion too; most of all was probably 20 different people saying I might have Lyme disease and I should look into. I kept reading about Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lyme disease on-line, I was becoming very educated on them all. I knew my lifestyle might point to Lyme and in a lot of ways it “made sense” to me. Cause and effect. . ., but I really didn’t think that was what it was as my symptoms where a bit different. I did get a Lyme test and went to a naturopath just to make sure and to have answers for people when they ask be about it. Both the test and the naturopath were negative on Lyme.

Although I didn’t disagree with the diagnosis, I did think I should get a second opinion and did, with the same diagnosis and treatment. So with three doctor’s confirming it was Lupus, I started to accept my new fate and started to try and figure out how to live my life with Lupus.