Anna Davis-Abel
Women Who Cry Wolf
My fingers wouldn’t stretch straight. The pale skin was puffy and swollen. Over the knuckles, heat radiated painfully. I rested my palms on my thighs and looked up at the doctor scribbling on his notepad.
“I’ll write you a steroid, but you’re going to need blood work,” he explained while not explaining a thing.
I nodded, mute. Twenty-two years I’d lived, and still, I couldn’t look doctors in the eye. No amount of recent practice had helped.
The doctor offered me a form to take to the lab. I stared at the paper, unmoving, then glanced back to my hands. I didn’t know how to make my fingers reach for his offering. I couldn’t grip the page. He let the paper fall to the floor between us. We both stared down at the illegible writing, waiting.
I want to tell you a story. A story about women with wolves in their skin. A story that starts with claws.
- - - -
Werewolves are some of the first creatures to haunt our oldest myths. The earliest record we know of – The Epic of Gilgamesh – features a jilted lover who turns their previous partner into a wolf as punishment. In Greek mythology, Zeus turns one of Pegasus’ sons into a wolf over a practical joke. In Nordic folklore, a father and son find wolf pelts while hunting and transform into wolves. The story ends with death and blood, with the father attacking his own son out of prideful folly. In all its tellings, the werewolf lore is clear: to transform into the beast is a punishment. A curse.
What has been lost in the tellings is something different. In the original myths – the oldest ones that gave birth to the others – the werewolves are women.
- - - -
I sat across from the rheumatologist and fixated on his red bow tie, trying to make sense of his words. It was the fourth time in a week I’d sat before him, and each day, the bowtie was a different color. He closed his eyes behind wooden-framed glasses and
explained the diagnosis to me.
Lupus. My mother’s disease. An autoimmune condition that meant my body didn’t recognize itself: that my immune system was devouring me from the inside.
“I am sorry it’s not better news.” He sounded genuine. I wanted to reach across the space between us and squeeze his hand. Not because I was afraid, but because I was sorry he felt so bad. He was the first doctor to take me seriously. The first to tell me
it wasn’t all in my head. I wanted him to know this wasn’t his fault.
“What do I do now?” I asked. What did anyone do when they learned there was a monster inside them?
The doctor reached into a cabinet behind me and pulled down a pack of subcutaneous needles. “We have to be aggressive,” he explained. “You’re at risk of stroke.”
I watched as he taught me how to inject the yellow vial of chemotherapy into my belly fat. He massaged the burn under my skin as the poison meant to save me dispersed. “It will make your hair coarse and brittle,” he apologized.
The price I pay to live.
- - - -
The connection between womanhood and lycanthropy is well documented. The lover in Gilgamesh that doomed her partner to a life as an animal was a woman scorned. In Fennoscandian lore, werewolves were old women possessing poison-dipped claws and eyes that could kill cattle and paralyze children. The Navajo told tales of women witches who transformed into animals by night, almost always choosing to become wolves. And in Armenian legend, women were sentenced to seven years in wolf form for
unforgivable sins.
In all the stories, there is another character beyond the woman and her wolf. There is the moon. In tale after tale, every thirty days or so when the moon becomes full, the wolf women’s truest natures are revealed. They lose control. Become rabid. Hysterical. Lunatics.
The word lunatic translates to losing one’s mind based on the phase of the moon.
- - - -
When I was a kid, my mother told me she was allergic to the sun. She hid under umbrellas during our beach vacations and smeared herself in thick streams of sunblock. Even with these extra measures, her skin erupted with red scaly patches. The discoloration almost always covered her face.
“It’s just the sun and my funky arthritis,” she’d explained, and then laughed when I inadvertently made a face. Funky arthritis was what she called her lupus – a diagnosis she received while carrying me in her womb. The disease and I had been twin parasites
inside her.
“Arthritis is for old people,” I’d answered then. I never thought too hard about it, never pushed for more. Her aches felt like punishment for aging, something beyond me and foreign, but also just a fact of life.
Years later, when I called to tell her my own diagnosis, my mother was quiet on the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry,” she uttered. I knew she didn’t mean generally. Her words were too heavy: a weight, pulling us under. She was afraid she’d passed her curse on to me.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I insisted. I peered into the mirror on my car’s visor. The rash on my cheeks had begun to fade, but in its healing, the skin had started to peel. I grimaced as a flake gave way under my probing fingernail. Like my mother, I was shedding my skin. I was becoming something else.
- - - -
Like all things when it comes to lupus, there is debate about where the name originates. Most publications award a thirteenth-century physician named Rogerius Frugard with coining the term. Supposedly a young woman came stumbling into his cottage one
evening, her body swollen and red. Frugard took one look at her inflamed, mottled face and thought she’d been bitten by a wolf. He took the word lupus from the latin word lupin meaning of the wolf.
There’s not a lot of evidence for what causes lupus. There’s some thought that it can be genetic, or maybe environmental, or some combination of forces that are as much about luck as seeing a Blue Moon. What we do know is that the disease is tied to female sex hormones. Estrogen. Progesterone. Maybe both. That’s the guess as to why ninety percent of people with lupus are women, and why every month when my period comes, my hands ache and swell into claws.
- - - -
After my diagnosis, I felt aimless. I knew how to inject my medication and how to treat the scales forming along my skin. I was learning the limitations of my body, the ways it would not bend and move like the girl it had been before. But what I didn’t know was how to keep being human in spite of it. How to keep living without fearing the thing
inside me.
That’s when I found the first support group. It was easy to find. I searched Lupus on Facebook and half a dozen results populated my screen. I mindlessly pressed the blue “join” button for each one. The confirmations flooded my notification bar. Like witnessing a catastrophe, I couldn’t look away from the profiles that filled the message boards.
I learned there was a term some lupus patients called each other. Lupie. A play on the word lupus, of course, but also a tongue-and-cheek reference to being loopy. Loopy as in crazy. Loopy as in uncontrolled hysteria. Loopy as in the look doctors gave us when we complained of pain no one could see.
Before the support groups, I’d thought my own diagnosis journey was bad. I’d had a female doctor tell me my hands ached because I needed to lose weight. A young male doctor said my chest pains were from breathing cold air. An older doctor patted my leg when I cried to her about my aching joints and told me, This is just what growing up feels like. Not even four weeks after her leg pat, I was injecting chemotherapy and praying my blood would not clot inside me.
Yet, scrolling the message boards, I quickly saw the lupie nature of it all. That my diagnosis had actually been fast. For most American women, it takes six years to get a correct diagnosis. Six years swearing the pain is real. Six years howling at the sky and being told it’s just womanly problems or it’s all in our heads.
It wasn’t that we hadn’t been crying for help. It was just that no one believed us.
- - - -
When I first joined the support groups, I was welcomed by dozens of other lupies. Some messaged about arthritis treatments they’d had success with. Others helped sort through my bloodwork and made sense of medical notes in my file. I felt supported, affirmed, and seen. In my diagnosis, I’d found a sisterhood, a pack of my own.
But it didn’t take long for me to understand that most women in the Lupus Support Group had not, in fact, been diagnosed with lupus. Instead, they were searching for answers. I scrolled through post after post: women posting pictures of pale faces captioned, “DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A MALAR RASH???” Long rambling narratives about aches and pains and bloodwork that didn’t reflect their hurt. Countless stories of husbands dismissing agony, of doctors refusing to test.
At first, I hated the women who posted these things. I clicked through profile after profile, my disgust deepening. So many of them appeared lonely: military spouses, housewives of workaholic husbands, and widows forgotten by their families. Their posts devolved into borderline hysteria. Someone who had an official diagnosis – I came to recognize their names after a while – would comment on one of the pale-faced pictures and say they didn’t see a rash. The poster would reply, nearly feral, that we were gaslighting their symptoms. Unfailingly, the diagnosed lupies would pile into the comments, pointing out the flaws. It was a daily bloodbath in Arial font.
We were women eating our own, and I was no exception. I read their posts and asked accusingly, Why are you so determined it should be lupus? Why aren’t you glad the symptoms are wrong? Why are you sad the bloodwork doesn’t match? What I was really asking was, Why would you want this curse?
It took me a long time to understand that it wasn’t the disease the women wanted, but the name. There is power in naming something, in being able to label what is happening inside of you. Because to have a diagnosis is to have confirmation that the problem exists beyond you. That you can’t have made it up.
- - - -
Originally, myths about werewolves weren’t tied to the lunar cycle. Instead, women who metamorphosed did so by choice. They embraced their fury by night and became things to fear. They became powerful. Over time, though, as men shaped the tales across generations, the werewolf evolved into something shackled by transformation. Instead of embodying power and transmuting by choice, the beasts in their stories became slaves to the moon. The werewolves had as little self-determination as they would with an illness. Their strength was recast as weakness.
In Bible school, I was taught there was a reason it hurt to be a woman. That the pain of childbirth and, by extension, painful menstrual cramps were deserved. Pain was punishment for Eve’s original sin. There was a penance hiding in our wombs, doomed
to purge by blood each month.
Interestingly, each month, a new moon emerges. The process takes roughly twenty-nine days. The average menstrual cycle takes twenty-eight. It’s no surprise then that the word menstruation draws its roots from two Latin words: mensis meaning “month” and mene meaning “moon.” I’ve always wondered if this was why we call the moon a Mother and why, in the romantic languages, moon is always feminine.
Since my diagnosis, I’ve started to question everything I once thought was certain, even language. Like, is being ‘as fickle as the moon’ even an insult? If the moon’s change is natural and constant, is it fickle or just misunderstood? Maybe that’s another thing misbranded by time. The first of those ancients who taught us about the sky–Thales, Heracleides, Ptolemy, Plato–who were they but men telling stories we choose to believe?
- - - -
It has been seven years since a doctor first told me that I would not be getting better. Seven years since I first shot Mountain-Dew colored acid into my belly and vomited hot bile against cold porcelain. Seven years since I started checking the box for Yes, I have a disability on employment papers, and despite seven years, I still feel like a fraud every time.
I’ve seen people call lupus an invisible disability, and it has taken me all these seven years to acknowledge that invisible doesn’t mean imagined. I hope it won’t take seven more for me to actually believe that. Because to anyone on a normal day, I look like a regular woman. My hair is long and full, and my make-up hides scars from old rashes. My joints rarely swell because of the malarial drug I take every twelve hours. My fatigue doesn’t show in my shoulders, and immunocompromised doesn’t reflect in a mirror. I am indistinguishable from any other woman, as ordinary as the moon at night.
But I know that there is something different inside me. Lurking beneath my skin might be a monster as old as myths. Some call it a curse in my genes, a punishment for my sex. Modern tales talk of injectables and immunosuppressants, ignoring the beast that lies in wait behind my swelling, all claws, pain, and rage. One day, there may be a cure for this monster that ails women like me, a silver bullet for our pain.
For now, all we can do is lie in bed each night, waiting for the change.