Most people really don't know enough about autoimmune diseases. Actually, I don't even know enough. People ask me what I have everyday and it's too complex to explain. That's one of the hardest parts about living with an autoimmune disease. I can't explain to people what I have because I don't even know what that is. The first 5 times I got sick, all I knew about my condition was that my immune system was so overactive that it shut down. People would ask more about it, and that was literally all I knew. In 11th grade though, people would ask me, and I realized I should probably know more about what I was living with. I read a lot of articles and learned about general autoimmune disorders. I couldn't research what I had, so I started researching as many conditions as I could.
Before I talk about any of the diseases though, I think everyone needs to have a general knowledge of autoimmune disorders. They lie in your DNA, and they occur when the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys healthy tissue in your body because it can't tell the difference between healthy tissue and antigens (bacteria, viruses, toxins, etc.). Scientists haven't discovered yet what causes the immune system to no longer tell the difference between healthy body tissues and antigens. An autoimune disorders may result in destruction of one or more types of tissue, abnormal growth of an organ, changes in organ function. The most common organs and tissues affected are red blood cells, blood vessels, connective tissues, endocrine glands (like the thyroid or pancreas), musclesm, joints, and skin; however, there are more than 80 autoimmune diseases and the symptoms vary.There are many different tests, but the treatment is usually corticosteroids (like predisone) and nonsteroid drugs. I took prednisone and it helped, but I was miserable the entire time I was on them. I was taking 80 mg a day and I got to decrease by 10 mg every monday. At least that caused the week begin well, I guess!
It's okay to not know about the specific auto-immune diseases, but I think everyone needs to know what causes them in general and what happens in the body of someone who has one. There are blogs and discussion groups online filled with people who discuss recent articles about autoimmune diseases, talk about their personal stories, and help others who are living with one of the disorders. These people come together in these blogs and discussion pages to talk about what they don't get to talk about enough. Barlow says that "blogs create a fictional world and activity centers on that world in a way that may prove unlike anything we have seen before"(Barlow, p. 5) These discussions do that too. Living with an autoimmune disease is hard because you want people to know about it but you dont want it to be how they view you, and most people usually don't want to go around telling everyone about it. When I was sick, I never posted anything in the discussion, but just reading it made me feel better. The blogs and posts by others showed me that other people live with similar conditions as I do.
Does your particular autoimmune system attack a specific cell type, or does it change targets because it has a overall problem in determining between healthy cells and non-healthy ones?
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to answer the question if you don't want to, or feel uncomfortable talking about the subject.