Dealing with Disorder, Part One: Living With Enthisitis
Dealing with Disorder, Part One: Living With Enthisitis Skip Pulley Author's Note: I have been, in varying degrees of constant and consistent physical pain for most of my adult life. Some days, weeks, months and years, are better than others. I have multiple auto-immune disorders that run "concurrently" as it were. My specific physical conditions (enthesitis, arthritis, tendon disorder, sepsis in joints and narcolepsy) have combined to create a "perfect storm" of cause and effect, leading to multiple lifelong misdiagnoses. For example, when I was a teenage athlete, I was misdiagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. However, I was actually suffering from a type of narcolepsy related to autoimmune issues that were undiagnosed. Narcolepsy is an autoimmune disorder where immune cells mistakenly destroy hypocretin-producing neurons, creating a link with autoimmune arthritis through shared genetics and immune dysfunction. I understood that I had formerly been a chi...