So I realised the other day that my long gaps between blog entries aren’t necessarily a bad thing. When I thought about it, I don’t tend to blog when things are good, which not only is obviously a positive thing in itself, but it’s also led me to my most recent possible diagnosis.
I go to the rheumatology clinic every six months to check in with my consultant and make sure I’m still breathing. Unless something dramatic has happened, there generally isn’t anything much to say, and all I had to really mention this time round was that actually I’d had some pretty long periods of being pretty ok, but that when I did have a flare, it was generally pretty shit. Turns out this is remarkably relevant. My white blood cells have been causing chaos for a while now (hello Sjogrens), so given that there’s not a lot more to say regarding my fibromyalgia, they’re concentrating on this now instead. And the prime candidate is lupus.
Obviously being the mega House fan that I am, I had to resist the famous line of “It’s never lupus” and instead opted for something vaguely non committal instead. And then off I went to have the nice lady stick needles in my arm and take half a pint of blood.
To be perfectly honest, the diagnosis doesn’t make a huge amount of difference either way. The symptoms are much the same as fibromyalgia and as I’m already on hydroxychloroquine for the sjogrens, even the treatment is similar. But it does explain a couple of things, one of which is my inability to walk more than 100m without bring out of breath. I was just putting that down to one too many cakes and a shockingly bad level of fitness, but even I’ve had to admit that there’s no way I should be *that* unfit. The other plus point is that more people of heard of lupus, if not just thanks to House, so at least it might save the blank looks I get from fibromyalgia, or even worse, sjogrens.
So essentially, same shit, different name. But at least it’s possibly a more meaningful name.
Musings and Snoozes 