The Ultimate Betrayal

When your own body turns on you, how do you fight back? Sarah Freeman reflects on her journey living with an autoimmune disease

- Sarah Freeman

I’m an unlucky statistic in one of the developed world’s fastest-growing groups of diseases, autoimmune — an umbrella term for about 80 conditions such as lupus and multiple sclerosis. I have a lump in my throat just writing this — perversely ironic, given the butterfly-shaped gland at the front of my neck is slowly but surely withering away.

Autoimmune (AI) causes your immune system to mistake perfectly healthy cells, organs and glands (such as the thyroid) for foreign bodies and sets about destroying them. Of the 1.2 million people affected in Australia, three-quarters are women, and, according to the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, “the total economic impact is $30 billion every year — twice that of cancer”.

My story begins one glorious English summer’s day, four years ago at my family home. I’d just returned from 12 months doing the hippie trail in South America, in seemingly rude health. Six days later I was hooked up to intravenous steroids, my eyes swollen shut, looking like a patient on Botched. Doctors were baffled. Could it be an extreme version of hayfever or an incurable tropical disease I’d brought back from the Pantanal? It turned out to be neither. But finding this out was to be a long and emotional rollercoaster.

A subsequent appointment with an immunologist hit on the culprit: new loft insulation fitted in my parents’ house (harmless enough) was sealed damp, so released toxic spores into the air. It didn’t exactly explain my extreme allergic reaction, but once the offending material was stripped out, my cheekbones reappeared and within a couple of months I felt normal again, enough to relocate from England to sunny Dubai for a new job, leaving my medical dramas 7000 kilometers behind me.