A Spanish teen’s genome may hold the secret to lupus
My mother had Lupus. It&#x27;s kind of another &quot;American medicine failure&quot; story. She&#x27;d go to the doctor&#x27;s office and get berated for being a painkiller junkie even though she never once asked for painkillers. Doctors would just look at her record and assume. When she finally did get a doctor that tried to help, she got put on this weird steroid that made her body a little stronger but at the cost of some brain fog.<p>She was on that drug for 10-odd years before going to a different hospital on a whim. The new doctor concluded that actually the Lupus wasn&#x27;t even active. It was in remission and had been for years. Turns out, the previous doctor was skipping some routine tests because the results were always the same.<p>Mom got off the drug and her mind got better but her body didn&#x27;t. Off the drug, she was basically in the same physical state as she was on the drug. Couldn&#x27;t walk or even sit down for more than a couple hours without pain. So what&#x27;s going on? She started getting her bones checked to see if there was some kind of alignment problem. There was some old film of her as a toddler that showed her walking funny, and she also once had a bad accident doing sports, which seemed like potential evidence for something skeletal.<p>Before she could figure anything else out, she found a lump and got diagnosed with cancer. It originally looked like regular breast cancer but the breast cancer chemo didn&#x27;t work. Turns out it&#x27;s this super-rare &quot;meta-plastic&quot; cancer that nobody at the hospital had ever seen before. She just went through palliative care and hospice then died only a year after finding the tumor.<p>Turns out there were some studies saying the drug she was on for longer than necessary is correlated with rare cancers. Unfortunately I don&#x27;t have the name of the drug or the details of the cancer on hand right now. Anyway, it&#x27;s cool to see some research that might eventually help Lupus patients avoid getting yelled at for popping pills (even when not actually popping pills).