Sometimes when people deal with chronic pain or with an ongoing illness, they will start to ignore symptoms that may be warning signs of serious complications. They may ignore them because they are to busy to be bothered with them, or they may just be so used to those types of problems that they assume that they are just more of the same problem.

It is essential that lupus patients remain aware and proactive when dealing with new symptoms or old symptoms that return with regularity. A trip to the doctor may be inconvenient, but it could save your life. Sometimes when the ostrich sticks its head in the ground, it gets run over by a jeep.

The lesson for the week is don’t get run over by a jeep.

My wife has been having a lot of problems lately remembering things and has been acting a little odd. This isn’t a new symptom of her lupus, but it is one that tends to vary in severity. Sometimes people refer to this as lupus fog, and it can also be related to fibromyalgia, but I feel like what has been happening lately is a bit more severe.

I found this on the Lupus International website:

NEUROCOGNITIVE DYSFUNCTION is also a common and overlooked clinical feature of lupus estimated to occur in up to 80% of affected individuals. The diversity of cognitive impairments parallels the considerable variability of the disease process. Deficits in learning and/or memory, reasoning, verbal fluency, motor function, basic attention, and information processing speed are the most consistently described.

This is precisely the kind of things my wife’s been dealing with for years, although never all of them at once. (more…)