Ah Lupus, the disease where you look ok on the outside to most people but when it gets to the place where you look like shit, you're in a world of hurt.

I haz a lupus too.

As the MTA (NYC mass transit) says in posters re: disability - not all disabilities are visible.

fighting one disaster or another because my cheeks would get dark pink and everybody else would think I was looking healthy for a change. It just signaled a bad flare and some sort of weird thing it took doctors a while to figure out.

I've always resisted the lupus diagnosis because I never thought I was quite that sick. I knew I had lupus-lite, Sjogren's, because a biopsy had confirmed it. When I look back over all the horrible things that have happened over the years, I'm not quite as sure.

I wish this article would get read widely, it explains so much about all of us living with a bowlful of alphabet soup chronic illnesses.

I'm a champion isolator, I just hate trying to plan things, being out of spoons that day and having to cancel. Civilians don't understand that we're not blowing them off, we're sick.

And I agree with Bettinger. It hurts to live.

...and RA and fibromyalgia among other things.

Not doing so well because Hubs and I are downsizing - moving from a single family house to a "manufactured home".

It is 25 to life for premeditated murder or I would be a widow. My Hubs lost my last Orencia injectable and I was left with Enbrel. I had myself switched from Enbrel because it doesn't hardly work anymore. I am in for a ruff week, therefore, and have been crying off and on this evening.

But it will be better.

I keep reminding myself that only a dozen years ago this disease was barely survivable. So, could be worse; could be dead.

Regards from Rosie