So one of my friends was recently diagnosed with lupus. I’m sure it happens ‘all the time’ elsewhere, but like everybody thinks, it won’t happen in my world. Especially since it’s rare, or rare-ish… right? But I guess it did.
Is this sort of thing really so random? Just… by chance perhaps, this one person and not the other. Her not me. Genetics? Luck? It started with a seemingly-unconnected bout of food poisoning overseas, followed by a month or so of loss of appetite, unsettled stomach, a bit of nausea, etc. Could it possibly be lingering after-effects of food poisoning? Then why didn’t the antibiotics help, and why couldn’t the doctors figure it out?
Then the hospital tests and biopsies and then the diagnosis. “I’d never even heard of it before they told me,” she said, incredulously. “I was like, No way, you can catch that from an undercooked dumpling?” Even when I hung out with her in hospital for a weekend, she made me smile.
No flowers for you girl, you don’t need pretty boringness like that, you want LEGO!
But I digress.
We were only starting to become friends, too. We’re working together in the new spot, and it was a new spot for both of us, so we had something in common. Both finding our feet, figuring out what the place was like, hoping for friends.
How many SMS messages and random emails and stupid Drawsome pics do you think it takes before you become friends?
It has been very sobering, actually, to be this close to something so life-changing. It will now factor into all their plans – all of them, forever. Well, not if God miraculously heals, but let’s just say for now that He doesn’t.
You know, I don’t think I would ever have wished it on anybody, and certainly not her, and I’m not glad it is in any way affecting anyone I know and care for… but I am grateful. I am grateful that it wasn’t me. When you think about it, that’s a kind of terrible thing to say. But it’s true.