Word: lupus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cells out of the blood, or any of the foreign material that may be circulating in it, doctors have been turning to a special blood-separation technique. Used by blood banks for at least a decade and more recently as an experimental therapy for other immune-system disorders like lupus erythematosis, myasthenia gravis and polymyositis, it is somewhat similar to hemodialysis for kidney patients. For three or so hours, the blood is slowly tapped from the body, shunted into a centrifuge, spun and separated into its constituents by weight: heavy red cells sink to the bottom, white cells settle...
...Saratoga Springs, N.Y., along with luminous fellow guests like Robert Lowell. She had settled down in the Connecticut household of Poet Robert Fitzgerald, his wife Sally and a brood of small children, working on a novel optioned by a New York publisher. Then she was hit with disseminated lupus erythematosus, a severe disease that could be kept at bay only with drugs and a straitened, cautious existence. She went home and wrote as hard as her reduced energy would permit. Two novels and a volume of short stories created a critical stir. In 1964 she was readying a second book...
...Roman Catholic, and the vision that animated all her fiction came early: the infusion of divine grace into the lives of rustic, often grotesque characters who either do not recognize or cannot handle it. This plus talent and true grit guaranteed her status as an original. But the lupus made her a prodigious writer of letters as well. "Mail is very eventful to me," she wrote one friend shortly after returning to Georgia. "I never mind writing anybody," she told another. "In fact it is about my only way of visiting people as I don't get around much...
During the months and even years when the disease is in a mild stage, the patient may need only aspirin-or no treatment at all. But when lupus flares up, doctors resort to more powerful weapons. Corticosteroids are commonly used to control inflammations. Skin rashes can be reduced by antimalarial drugs, and even the immune system's rampaging white cells can be brought under control by some of the same potent drugs used against cancer cells...
Because effects of these medicines are sometimes severe, doctors must use them judiciously. Patients too must help; stress, overexertion and strong sunlight all can cause a sharp relapse. As Dr. Sheldon Blau and Dodi Schultz explain in their new book Lupus (Doubleday; $5.95): "The patient and doctor must function as a partnership-analogous, perhaps, to a police team on foot patrol, never knowing from what source trouble may appear, but constantly prepared to cope with any eventuality...