Living with a chronic auto-immune disease like lupus can feel like free falling through a medical minefield. Pain, frustration and fear are natural reactions while holding onto hope for more effective treatment and an eventual cure. Hope is one reason Spokane’s Cindy Stroup leaped from an airplane over Shelton, Wash., on Aug. 20 to join hands and feet with 25 other female sky divers in a record-setting formation. Jill Barville SR story here. (Courtesy photo: Cindy Stroup)

Question: Most of us don't know a thing about certain diseases, like lupus, until we (or a family member) are afflicted by it. I, for example, didn't know what retinal blastoma (eye cancer) was until it afflicted a family member. Now I know that it hits 1 in 100,000. Is there a strange-sounding disease you're more familiar with as a result of an encounter that is/was too close?