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We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said.
This was the only time in my mother’s long experience with doctors that she had hoped for positive test results. At least then we would have an answer.
Sometimes, just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.
Studies seem to point to all autoimmune diseases in general as being about two-thirds environmental, one-third genetic.
Although this number is probably decreasing as the disease becomes better known, there are still people who are suffering from something treatable and not receiving the proper intervention.
When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses in the United States has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.
The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, one day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.
is one of the more than one hundred different kinds of autoimmune diseases that afflict an estimated 50 million people in the United States, a staggering figure that has more than tripled in the past three decades. An alarming majority of autoimmune diseases—around 75 percent—occur in women, affecting us more than all types of cancer combined.
“I haven’t seen one of these in decades!” said one of the doctors. Please, don’t ever let me be interesting again.
