Tuesday, May 10, 2011

It's Never Lupus? May 10 is World Lupus Day

If I hear "It's never lupus" one more time I'm going to personally track down the writers of House MD and force them to clean my toilets with their tongues. And we have 3 toilets.

I have a few questions for these writers:
Why are you running an anti-awareness campaign? Would you do this for any other equally terrible disease? Would you say "It's never cancer?" or "It's never MS?" or "It's never Parkinson's?"
How about "It's never a heart attack?" No, because if this were a comedy club, you'd be booed off the stage.

Why does anyone think "it's never lupus" is funny? My only guess is that it's because the word "lupus" sounds funny, like dodo bird or cuckoo clock. I wish we could rename the disease to better reflect how awful it is. How about "crapstorm?" No, still too funny.

It's never lupus... Having had lupus for 20 years now, I've had it cause anemia, kidney failure, stroke, hair loss, weight loss, congestive heart failure... oh, I guess none of that ever happened either.

I was watching House MD- the episode where the patient was in Antartica in a lab and had to be examined by House long-distance, over teleconference. While he was brainstorming about all the possible things she could be suffering from, one of the things House guessed was... LUPUS!!! (this coming from Mr "it's never lupus!"). But in order to keep their running "joke" intact, they referred to it as "SLE." (systemic lupus erythmatosis). Nice way to have your cake and eat it too, a-holes.

Because there are 1.5 million people or more in the US alone with lupus, it's just a matter of time before someone on the House MD writing staff (or someone in their family) develops lupus. I don't wish it on them, but the odds are good. Oh wait, I forgot, there's no such thing as lupus.

What a relief then. I'll just stop getting blood tests and chalk up my years of symptoms (and by "symptoms," I mean stroke, kidney failure, congestive heart failure) to hypochondria. Or maybe it was psychosomatic. In which case, if kidney failure is psychosomatic, then everything is. Cancer, MS, all of it.

And the world is flat, and we never landed on the moon.

"It's never lupus?"- it's never funny.