Have you ever heard of Sarcoidosis? I hadn’t either until my mom was diagnosed with it eight years ago. My mom takes a lot of medicine for it. Everyday when she wakes up out of bed she is in pain and tired. She takes twelve prescriptions. Some she takes more than once a day so after at the end of the day she takes twenty four pills a day plus two inhalers. She has the disease in several places in her body so she sees five different doctors and four of them are specialties for her Sarcoidosis. She sees a rheumatologist, a neurologist, a pulmonologist,and an ophthalmologist for her symptoms and a general doctor to coordinate it all.
In my paper I want to talk about what Sarcoidosis is and the reasons that diagnosing it and living with …show more content…
Patients are often treated for other things before they diagnose Sarcoidosis. It is often “diagnosed when a physician suspects the cold-like symptoms have been going on too long to be a common cold and orders an X-ray and notices large lymph nodes.” (Kalkanis 1) But mom’s started in her joints. For 2 years they thought she had Rheumatoid Arthritis. Then she got sick with pneumonia three times in one year so they looked deeper. They did the x-ray, then a CAT scan, then a PET scan. They told her she had lung cancer. She went to a surgeon in Columbia who told her it could be this thing called Sarcoidosis so they were going to do surgery to do a biopsy of her lymph node so they could see what it was. That is when she found out that she really has Sarcoidosis. “The only way to rule in sarcoidosis is to rule out everything else.” (Ebony 1)
“While autopsies indicate involvement of most organs in the majority of patients with sarcoidosis, the disease is clinically manifest only when it affects function (apparently not the case in our patient) or when it is readily and often serendipitously observed, as in our patient's x-ray.” (McCue 2) Over the years my mom has found out she has it in her lungs, lymph nodes, joints, skin, eyes, and
In my paper I want to talk about what Sarcoidosis is and the reasons that diagnosing it and living with …show more content…
Patients are often treated for other things before they diagnose Sarcoidosis. It is often “diagnosed when a physician suspects the cold-like symptoms have been going on too long to be a common cold and orders an X-ray and notices large lymph nodes.” (Kalkanis 1) But mom’s started in her joints. For 2 years they thought she had Rheumatoid Arthritis. Then she got sick with pneumonia three times in one year so they looked deeper. They did the x-ray, then a CAT scan, then a PET scan. They told her she had lung cancer. She went to a surgeon in Columbia who told her it could be this thing called Sarcoidosis so they were going to do surgery to do a biopsy of her lymph node so they could see what it was. That is when she found out that she really has Sarcoidosis. “The only way to rule in sarcoidosis is to rule out everything else.” (Ebony 1)
“While autopsies indicate involvement of most organs in the majority of patients with sarcoidosis, the disease is clinically manifest only when it affects function (apparently not the case in our patient) or when it is readily and often serendipitously observed, as in our patient's x-ray.” (McCue 2) Over the years my mom has found out she has it in her lungs, lymph nodes, joints, skin, eyes, and