With stifling June heat and pollen cleared by rainfall, I opened my windows. Drivers finished their workdays and inched forward in traffic outside my home. Within minutes, gentle breezes carried exhaust fumes inside. I thought that by living two stories up I would escape car pollution, a common…

Father’s Day was always a good time for my family when I was growing up. My brother and I were raised by a single mother, but my maternal grandfather and uncle were role models. We come from a large family, so we always had my…

Recently, I thought about my past hospitalizations and how isolated I felt. I guess the events over the past three months with social distancing had me feeling isolated … again. I thought about the two months I spent in the lung center at one of our hospitals in…

I’ve avoided others throughout the pandemic because of my sarcoidosis. I had thought that if I ever ditched social distancing, it would be to embrace family, but it wasn’t. The first person to touch me since March was a mammography technologist who positioned me for a procedure that was…

The Black Women’s Health Imperative (BWHI) recently created a Rare Disease Diversity Coalition focused on reducing racial disparities in the rare disease community. Getting a timely and accurate diagnosis for a disease that few people — sometimes even physicians — have heard of is challenging on its own merit.

An employer once asked me what was the one wish I wanted granted. Having battled sarcoidosis for years while in the workforce, the answer came easy. I asked for the option to telecommute. At the time, my wish didn’t come true.  June 11 is National Work From Home…

ATYR1923, a candidate therapy for pulmonary sarcoidosis, binds specifically to the neuropilin-2 (NRP2) receptor protein, which is located at the surface of immune cells responsible for inflammation and granuloma formation in lung sarcoidosis, the treatment’s developer, aTyr Pharma, has announced. These findings are described in two posters,…

Sometimes in relationships flaws become too glaring to ignore, which either leads to compromise or goodbye. That is now the case in my long love affair with meat.  I’ve made sacrifices over the years. My dates with the bad boys (red meat) aren’t nearly as frequent now.

Runny nose, sneezing, coughing, and itchy, watery eyes. Getting a breath of fresh air ain’t what it used to be. Spring allergy season is underway in the U.S. And it’s going to be a lengthy, brutal stint for those of us in the East, according to AccuWeather meteorologists. …

I felt vindicated last year when researchers reported Lyme disease could potentially trigger sarcoidosis. I’ve been trying to get physicians to see a link between the two for years. I used to expect some dramatic “aha” moment when I reported that my sarcoidosis arrived a year after my Lyme…