The Wrong Disease

This diagnosis was not meant for me. It's far too needy.

I recently had a health scare. The scariest part was not the diagnosis. It was the realization that the doctor was describing a condition entirely unsuited to my personality.

She explained that I might have an auto-immune disease. She listed the possibilities with the calm efficiency of someone reading from a menu. My reaction, kept largely to myself, was: this will not work for me.

An auto-immune disease is what happens when your immune system, bored, restless and looking for a fight, turns on your own body. It can affect any system - joints, skin, kidneys, nerves. One major condition of its tenancy is that it demands your constant attention. You must monitor your environment, track your symptoms, catalogue how you feel. You must participate actively with the disease rather like the modern parent is required to be interested in every minute of their child’s schooling.

I have ADHD. Participation of this kind is not available to me. I am focused on the end-game. Let me explain.

Last month I burned myself on the oven rack. I noticed the smell before I noticed the injury. I finished the roast, made a jus, plated everything. Then I looked at my arm. My husband said it needed medical attention. I said just wrap it up.

This is simply how I operate.

A disease requiring constant self-monitoring has badly misjudged its host.

Lupus - and I mean no disrespect to sufferers, only to lupus itself - requires you to think about sunlight. Not in the lovely here-comes-summer way. In the constant, tactical, is-that-window-against-me way. It wants to feature in your day. It wants a recurring calendar event and your full executive function. I have neither to give.

What would suit me is something binary, that does not run in my family. Heart disease for example. Something where people go about their lives normally - shops, tennis, clipping the errant hedge - and then, without administrative burden, they drop. No monitoring phase. No lifestyle journal. The disease asks almost nothing and then settles the matter cleanly. This is a condition that understands me.

Lupus, frankly, is for someone from Gen Z. I say this without malice. It is purely a question of the right fit. A young person with a ring light, a groaning supplements shelf, and a genuine gift for the phrase “my body is going through something right now” is far better placed to meet this disease where it lives. They would document the journey. They would find the community. They would post the blood panel results with a tasteful filter and a caption about resilience. Lupus would finally get the audience it always felt it deserved. Two, perhaps three decades of content. Everyone wins.

I raised this question of compatibility with the doctor. She looked at me in a way that suggested this framework was not covered in medical school. She spoke about referrals. I made a mental note to follow up and lost it almost immediately.

The tests came back inconclusive. The auto-immune theory remains unconfirmed. Somewhere, an ambitious little antibody is perhaps reconsidering its options.

I hope it finds someone with a better attention span. And a ring light.

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