Journalist Linda Rodgers and I had such a lovely conversation when we spoke about this piece. I’ve told my story many handfuls of times, but Linda’s writing really nailed it – she even took me back through my own emotional and health journey in this article for HealthCentral. My hope with this piece is that other patients can find familiarity in our stories, and see that there is hope for treatments that give us all a chance to getting back to what we love to do. I also hope that non-patients get a little bit of a deeper peek into what life with symptoms is like, at least in my experience, and how much having access to treatments can change literally everything.
“She went through her medical history and when she was through, her doctor told her, “You’re 24. You deserve to live your life.”
‘I pretty much started crying right there because no one in the medical system had ever recognized that before—this isn’t just a list of symptoms and we have to keep the inflammation down,” says Starshak. “This is this thing that stands between me barely getting by every day and me living my life, and going after my dreams. And it was just a wave of relief and hope.’ ” [read full piece on HealthCentral.com]