Customer Reviews

Embracing the Wolf: A Lupus Victim and Her Family Learn to Live with Chronic Disease

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You have a choice with Lupus...you can run from it and end up with more flares and illness than ever...Or you can embrace the wolf, ie: Lupus, and learn it's characteristics and all about it, thereby learning how to best fight it and so come out 'carefree as a butterfly'...as this author so very aptly tells us...the best way of fighting anything is to know it well and get under its' skin so to speak....by doing so ending up the winner in a fight for your life with lupus...a chronic, invasive, insidious and incurable inflammatory illness..one of the worst to enter our human condition, according to most specialists in the rheumatic disease field.

Joanna Permut's book Embracing The Wolf is primarily the story of how the author and her husband came to terms with her lupus, and how they both learned to accept it. That allowed the author to summon all her resources to fight the disease, and find a healthier and happier life.

I don't have lupus, but someone close to me does. This book I found to be immensely helpful. The book is not just about lupus, but it's about a couple coming to terms with a disease, and two individuals coming to terms with THEIR disease in different ways.

I read this book because I wanted to better understand what my friend is going through with lupus. If you have a friend with lupus, I recommend this book to you.

Lupus can be so confusing to outsiders-- I'm sure many a romantic relationship and many a friendship have been strained or ended because non-sufferers don't understand the nature of the disease.

If you have a friend with lupus, do yourself a favor and read this book.

ken32

I was so glad to find that the author went through a screaming & nasty fighting phase with her spouse, and of course how she made it beyond that. Eerily close overlay of my experiences with totally different disability (chronic fatigue). Her perspective is noticably feminine, but I had no trouble finding close identity in her, even though I am male. Her story is extremely valuable surrogate communication tool between spouses who often can not express or hear directly the attempts to communicate with each other directly. Extremely valuable even if only one spouse (either sick one or healthy one) reads this book. 5*!

This is a rare and special narrative about successfully coping with chronic illness. The author tells her own story, but also incorporates the impact of her illness on her husband and daughter -- the critical family dimension that is so often overlooked in other books. The author tells how she learned to accept illness as a positive force in her life and move on. A "must read" for everyone who must deal with chronic illness. Highly recommended.

Prior to reading this book, I was "lost and alone" in my disease. Once read, I was veiled in a shroud of comfort, knowing the symptoms and emotions I was experiencing were not fabricated and/or exaggerated, but REAL. Thank you that was the best medicine I have recieved thus far!

I am a Lupus Patient and had NO idea what my family would go through when I had my diagnosis. It was right there for me to read and grasp but I didn't until after the fact. I watched my family get torn apart and almost lost my number one supporter (my husband) If I had a picture into what I was going to go through I would of been able to prepare and understand what was going on. Well this book is open and honest and would provide that cushion. I recommend it highly

This is the story of Joanna Baumer Permut who, in the midst of a wonderful job and family, finds herself not able to get well. Unexplained aches, pains and tiredness. Eventually she receives the diagnosis of Lupus and what happens next in the book is not so much a story of her, but the story of how Lupus affected her family, most importantly, her husband.

What I liked is that Joanna didn't pull any punches. She was very blunt about her symptoms and her feelings. But, she was also very straigh-forward about the clues she took from her husbnad, Steven. How she could tell he wasn't "embracing the wolf" and giving her the support she needed.

Even though this book was written in 1989, the story is playing out in someone else's life, somewhere in the world. The treatment for Lupus has changed and more and more people in the world are being educated about it.

Reading this book has given me even more hope for the future....knowing how far Lupus education has come, excites me because I know that I, we, are making a big difference in lives of people, real people such as Joanna and Steven.

Embracing the Wolf: A Lupus Victim and Her Family ... this book was awesome it really told the journey that you and your family take when the wolfe joins your family (uninvited I might add) but it shows that you can overcome the everyday problems and come to be able to survive and thrive with this problem