Muni Long Shares Lupus Struggles & 5 More Celebs With Disease
‘I’m In Excruciating Pain’—Muni Long Shares Struggles With Lupus & 5 More Celebs With The Autoimmune Disease
Singer-songwriter Muni Long is letting fans in on the daily details of her battle with lupus, the autoimmune disease that she was initially diagnosed with back in 2014.
In an exclusive in with People, Long, 36, shared the warning signs that signal when she has flare-ups related to the disease. “Like my fingertips will start turning blue. My skin will get really pale,” she told the outlet. “I’ll start looking super white. Which is hard to imagine because I’m brown-skinned. But literally my skin will turn like a light, ashy color.”
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Source: Julia Beverly / Getty
As an entertainer traveling around the world to different locations and venues, Long said that there are certain protocols she has to follow in order to stay healthy.
“Please turn the air off when I come in the building. I’m not being a diva, but literally if I get too cold, I start coughing and I won’t be able to sing,” Long said candidly. “And then when I get off stage, I have to lay down immediately and wrap up in covers and steam my voice.”
Additionally, the two-time Grammy winner revealed that she shares the same obstacles that many Black women face when they go to the doctor and doctors challenge or don’t believe her.
“As a Black woman, when I go to the doctor, they never listen. They don’t believe you. So it’s hard to tell them, ‘Hey, I’m in a lot of pain.’ They’re like, ‘OK, cool. Go get this blood work,’” she told People.
Source: JOCE/Bauer-Griffin / Getty
“I’m like, ‘OK, but that’s going to take you like a week [to get the results back.] I’m in excruciating pain. Is there anything you can do?’ And then it just becomes a thing of like they put down on your chart [something] like, ‘Oh, you’re asking for medication.’ It’s just so, so hard navigating with the way that the health care system is set up,” Long continued.
Muni Long isn’t the only celebrity who struggles with lupus. In honor of Lupus Alert Day (April 1), here are five other celebrities who also suffer with the autoimmune disease.
1. Toni Braxton
Source: Dan MacMedan / Getty
In November 2010, the Grammy award winner and multi platinum superstar announced that she was diagnosed with lupus in an interview with CBS News. “Today, I’m going to talk about it because I’m a survivor and I’m here, and I don’t want to lose hope,” Braxton said at the time. “Take a look—this is what lupus looks like.”
She has since be very vocal about living with the disease and has continued to be a staunch advocate and supporter of the Lupus Foundation of America.
2. Nick Cannon
Source: John Lamparski / Getty
During a visit to ABC’s Good Morning America in 2012, Cannon shared that he was living with lupus. “It’s a rare form of lupus that’s just attacking my kidneys,” he said at the time.
“They thought it was just kidney disease, and then they were trying to figure out why my immune system was attacking my kidneys, and that was sort of the root of it all.”
3. Trick Daddy
Source: Julia Beverly / Getty
After announcing that he had lupus back in 2009, the rapper further revealed that he decided against continuing any treatment for the disease. “I stopped taking any medicine that they was giving me,” he said.
“Because for every medicine they gave me I had to take a test or another medicine every thirty days or so to make sure that medicine wasn’t causing side effects – dealing with kidney or liver failure…I just said [expletive] it all together I ain’t taking no medicine,” Trick Daddy added.
4. Paula Abdul
Source: Robin L Marshall / Getty
The multi platinum singer/dancer shared in 2014 that she had been in remission from rheumatoid lupus — a condition that she kept privately. During a interview discussing her lupus symptoms, Abdul said that found out she had the autoimmune disease after she was in a plane crash and also due to her many dance injuries throughout her career.
5. Cori Broadus
Source: Variety / Getty
The daughter of hip hop elder statesman Snoop Dogg, Cori Broadus revealed in an exclusive 2023 interview with PEOPLE that she was diagnosed with lupus beginning at the age of 6, and decided to combat her symptoms with a holistic approach.
“I’ve had medication since I was 6 years old, depending on these drugs all my life. So I wanted better for myself,” she told the outlet at the time. “I wanted to change because it just became a lot. I’m only 24 years old, taking 10 to 12 pills every single day. So I kind of just went cold Turkey.”
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