For Andrea Wilson of Chicago, Valentine's Day 1994 marked the end of an eight-year search to identify the whodunit disease that had turned her life into a living hell -- a daily modus operandi of pain, fatigue and seemingly illogical symptoms.
(ABC News Photo Illustration)
"I'd been consistently misdiagnosed for ashcan School years," she recalls. "I was told it was multiple sclerosis. I was told it was a brain neoplasm. I was told it was scarcely stress -- that I was freaking out, that it was nothing."
But it was only when a chest X-ray revealed massive scarring in her lungs that doctors determined that she suffered from sarcoidosis -- a condition in which the body's resistant system triggers uncontrolled inflammation, wreaking mayhem on internal organs.
Wilson, like most others with sarcoidosis, experienced peculiarly severe inflaming in her lungs. But even and so, medical professionals hesitated to believe Wilson could receive suffered the degree of damage the X-ray showed.
"I was posing next to an old man in the doctor's waiting room," Wilson says. "The radiologist came out, looked at me and looked at the other guy, and said, 'I've mixed up these scans.'
"He thought my scans looked like an 80-year-old's scans."
Since her diagnosis, Wilson, now 43, has been waging a conflict on deuce fronts. There is her personal struggle to control her disease, for which there is no cure. And there is the larger elbow grease to increase awareness of the sickness. In 2000, she and her husband established the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research to that end.
But the disease has perhaps gotten the most attention from the untimely death of actor-comedian Bernie Mac final week. Mac battled the illness, which had plagued him with lung problems, for 25 years in front he died Aug. 9, at the age of 50.
Mac's publicizer has aforesaid it was pneumonia, not sarcoidosis, that led to Mac's demise. But those with sarcoidosis have a known predisposition to pneumonia. And the loss resonated among those in the sarcoidosis community.
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