If your disease is under control, your rheumatologist approves surgery AND your FANA (florescent anti-nuclear antibody) test comes back reasonably low, then surgery might be OK. However, that does not guarantee you will not have any healing problems; it just makes it less likely there will be problems. The test is extremely important. If it comes back high, it might indicate a resurgence of disease activity. If this happens you should wait until the disease subsides and the FANA returns to a low level again. Otherwise you could have some very difficult healing problems. We operate on many patients with lupus as long as the above criteria are met. However, even your immediate family members who do not exhibit signs of Lupus (brothers, sisters, parents, children) should be tested before undergoing a rhinoplasty, septoplasty, or Facelift. They might have a sub clinical case (no physical signs or symptoms of Lupus) that would put them at healing risk for this kind of surgery. One more point. There are different names used by various laboratories for the FANA test. Your rheumatologist will know what to order.