My wife and I made our eight-hour trek to UCLA Medical Center and back today, with nothing but frustration to show for our time. I know the doctor is doing her best, but we feel that things are no better than they were two years ago when we started going down to the UCLA lupus specialists.

My wife is sick of all the medications she has to take, and often wonders if the risks associated with many of these medications are worth the trouble. She is constantly approached by snake oil salesmen who claim that their herbal supplement will cure lupus. It’s all very discouraging.

Insomnia continues to be an issue here. Nothing seems to work and my wife has gotten into a cycle of very little sleep for a few days followed by a severe crash, accompanied by a massive mood swing. We will be visiting her rheumatologist at UCLA in a couple of weeks, so we are putting together a list of questions.

My own mood has been pretty bad lately, and I’m having a hard time keeping my dysthymia under control. It seems like everything always happens at once.

However, I do find encouragement from the slow accumulation of registered users on here on lupusfamily.com. It would be really great to create a community of friends that understand how lupus can effect your life. Sometimes it’s difficult to talk to people who don’t live with it everyday. If you have a topic you would like to write about, let me know. I am going to upgrade all registered users to contributors, so write a post on something related to lupus and submit it for publishing. If you are interested, register as a user and get writing.