Muni Long shares heartbreaking details of lupus flare-ups

An acclaimed singer-songwriter, Muni Long, has opened up about her daily battle with lupus, an auto-immune disease.

In a talk with PEOPLE about her new song Slow Grind, the 36-year-old star shared how lupus flare-ups affect her.

Long explained, “[People with lupus] have little signs, right? Like my fingertips will start turning blue. My skin will get really pale.”

“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 colour,” she added.

The Pain crooner went on to note that sometimes a bad lupus flare-up can affect a whole live performance, quipping, “I recently had to cancel my college football playoff performance on January 18th because I had a flare-up due to some personal things.”

Long, who was diagnosed with lupus in 2014, revealed that it has been hard to deal with the health care system as a Black woman because when she goes to the doctor, “they never listen.”

The Grammy winner added, “They don't believe you. So it's hard to tell them, ‘Hey, I'm in a lot of pain.’ They're like, ‘Okay, cool. Go get this blood work.’”

“I'm like, 'Okay, 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,” she stated.

For the unversed, lupus is a chronic auto-immune disease, which develops when the immune system starts to attack the body’s own tissues rather than protecting them, per the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Notably, the Lupus Foundation of America says lupus affects Black women more than White women.

They are three times more likely to get lupus, and as many as 1 in 250 will have it at some point in their life.