“I’m a fighter. I have faith. And I’m going to push to get a doctor that cares to fight for me too,” says Sherry D. (dx 2023).
This is the mindset that’s kept her going since October 2018, when Sherry first developed a cough that refused to let up. “I was coughing, and everything I ate just wouldn’t stay down,” she remembers.
Doctors initially suspected GERD, but treatments didn’t help, and finding foods she could tolerate became a daily struggle. In 2019, she returned to her home state of Texas, still searching for answers. A gastroenterologist found nothing in her endoscopy or colonoscopy, but an eventual referral to a rheumatologist revealed Raynaud’s and the possibility of other autoimmune diseases.
“It’s changed how I live,” she says of her scleroderma diagnosis. “I’ve had to slow down. I’ve changed how I eat and how I move. I don’t go out much anymore, since the coughing is embarrassing.”
These days, Sherry wants to be an advocate in the scleroderma community. “I want to be a face that people see, and know that you can keep living—no matter what friends, family, or doctor say,” she says. “I want to inspire others to keep positive thoughts, and to go before our government for more research funds.”
Research matters to her deeply, because she believes in its capacity to improve people’s lives. “I want to beat the statistics,” she says. “With changes and medicine, scleroderma can be controlled, and you can live a full life.”
Thank you, Sherry, for sharing your story and for your dedication to supporting scleroderma research. At the SRF, we share that same commitment to progress. By funding innovative research and accelerating clinical studies, we’re working to bring us closer to a world without scleroderma.
