About 1.5 million Americans have lupus disease and nine out of every 10 are women, according to the Lupus Foundation of America. Surprisingly, in two separate conversations about this autoimmune disease — one with a patient, the other with a specialist nurse — the word most frequently spoken was “unpredictable.”
“It’s a disability that you cannot describe because the whole thing about lupus is it’s so unpredictable,” Mallory Dixon, 29, told Medical Daily.
Describing her personal experience, she speaks with the lightest Southern lilt and sounds both young and purposeful at once. In the photograph attached to her email, an attractive, petite brunette with a taste for stylish clothes smiles broadly.
Among the ways lupus cannot be predicted is it strikes at any age, with little racial or ethnic preference, Dixon explains. Worst of all, symptom severity not only varies from patient to patient but also over a person’s lifespan, something she experienced first-hand. Though her doctors identified rheumatoid arthritis when she was 17 years old, Dixon continued to experience lupus symptoms that could not be explained for years.