After all of my efforts to remain germ-free I was reminded of a couple things this past week. The first is that hand soap and sanitizer don’t make me invincible. The second is that being homebound so much over the years while battling sarcoidosis has given me a “particular…
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This has been a rough week, to say the least. Last week, I lost one of my oldest aunts. She was my mother’s oldest sister and she meant a lot to me. She lived in Washington, D.C., and she let me live with her when I took a…
COVID-19, short for coronavirus disease 2019, is an infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a newly identified and highly contagious pathogen not previously seen in humans. Though it belongs to the same category of viruses as SARS and influenza…
Boehringer Ingelheim‘s Ofev (nintedanib) has been approved in the U.S. as the first treatment for chronic fibrosing interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) with a progressive phenotype. This approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) includes sarcoidosis, autoimmune ILDs, unclassifiable ILDs, chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis,…
Take a minute to think about what’s really important in your life. I find myself doing that more often than I used to. I often think about the things that mean the most to me like family, health, physical abilities, and friendships, but…
I began the year with good intentions. I simply wanted to invite more fun and less stress into my life. The first sign that my intentions for 2020 were going awry occurred on a work-related road trip with my husband. I awoke the first morning away with a pounding…
I have a rare health condition called sarcoidosis, which causes extreme fatigue, joint pain, and difficulty breathing. It can affect all of the major organs, including the lungs, heart, eyes, and skin. Sarcoidosis affects about five in 100,000 Caucasians in the U.S. For African Americans, that number jumps…
When I stumbled upon sarcoidosis in 2002, I was told it was rare for it to cause chronic health issues. What I wasn’t told was that the disease was rare. I haven’t come face to face with a single person with sarcoidosis since my diagnosis. Nor have I met…
Researchers have discovered that patients with pulmonary sarcoidosis have an imbalance in two subsets of immune cells, namely B-cells and follicular T-helper cells — findings that support the potential role of autoimmune mechanisms in sarcoidosis development. The study, “Imbalance in B cell and T Follicular Helper…
I’ve had an unusually difficult week. To put it plainly, the events of this past week have caused me great concern. For the most part, I’d been feeling pretty good since the start of the year, and I had several medical tests. But lately,…