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Reviewed By: Laura Martin,
SOURCES: 2007 Medical Reference from Medstar Television. Ellen Meryl Field, M.D., Rheumatologist, Gateway Professional Center, Bethlehem, PA.
© 1999-2011 Medstar Television
Heidi Ulshafer (ul-SHAY-fur) manages not one, but two busy day spas. She also manages a life threatening illness.
The disease attacks your sinuses, your kidneys and your lungs. And with that, I also have the skin vasculitis, which is lesions of the skin.
The disease is Wegener's (WEG-uh-ners) Granulomatosis (gran-U-low-MA-toe-sis) or W.G.
Which is a form of a vasculitis, which is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that attacks medium-size and small-size vessels but ultimately involves multiple areas in the body.
Doctor Field diagnosed Heidi in 1995.
I decided that I was going to go to a rheumatologist because I thought I had rheumatoid arthritis.
She has huge purple spots all over her hands and her nails have these, she calls them splinters but they're, they're like almost hemorrhages or they're vascularity-type side effects.
Once a death sentence, W.G. is now treated a bit like cancer, with a combination of chemotherapy and steroids.
My hands are clear.
It can be tough on the body and the drugs won't cure the condition, but they can give patients some 'quiet time.'
I don't call it remission. I call it 'quiet time' where my disease kind of quiets itself down. It lives within my body, so it's always active. It just depends that something can trigger it.
But more than a decade into her journey with this rare condition, Heidi doesn't allow the disease to define her. She finds spreading the word therapeutic. For WebMD, I'm Damon Meharg.
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