Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwi33
Winic1, I have been reading along here and hope that it is OK if I make a suggestion.
One way of helping to diagnose auto-immune diseases like RA and SLE is to run an anti-nuclear antibody (ANA) test.
There are two parts to it. The first is to measure the levels of ANA in your serum. The second is to observe the staining pattern of your ANA in the nuclei of cells from a human cell line; different auto-immune diseases tend to show different staining patterns.
Neither part of an ANA test is definitive (both false positives and false negatives are known) but if your serum ANA levels are abnormally high and you have a characteristic staining pattern then more detailed investigations would be a good idea.
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It was the ANA that was barely positive, and the staining patterns showed some stuff. This was in the blood tests run after there was that weirdly high SED rate. First rheumatologist I was sent to said no, it didn't count.
SED rates have been in normal range since then. Don't think they've run another ANA, if they did, it was normal. My bloodwork is always normal, except for the abnormally high number of red blood cells of abnormally small size--the thalassemia minor.
My bloodwork says I'm healthy as a horse. But the damn horse keeps trampling all over me.
Not