advocate for herself.
“I kept seeing somebody else because I knew something was wrong—somebody’s got to tell me something before I go. I said, ‘I need you to test me for everything. Something is wrong,’” she adds.
Although the doctors knew something was wrong, Kheesa’s test results came back normal making it challenging to find out exactly what was wrong.
Frustrated, Kheesa threw her hands up in the air discovering that they were purple.
“She said, ‘I know what that is. That’s called Raynaud’s phenomenon. When your body gets cold, your blood vessels constrict and turn your hands white, blue, purple, and they make them achy and swollen,’ which had been happening to me in July, anytime I got cold,” Kheesa shares.
Kheesa was referred to a rheumatologist who told her to refrain from getting pregnant for at least a year while they worked on stabilizing the condition. Six weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant.
“They wanted to take me off some medicines because they weren’t sure what it was going to do to the baby,” she shares. “ But then I gradually started getting worse, and they decided that it was more important to save me or to get me to a point where I was comfortable so that I could have the baby.”
Kheesa was barely eight months pregnant when a routine checkup turned into a whirlwind of events.
“The doctor informed me that the baby had moved into the birth canal, and I needed to head to the hospital for an immediate C-section,” Kheesa recalls. “Little did I know, this moment would mark the beginning of my journey with scleroderma-associated interstitial lung disease (SSc-ILD), a rare autoimmune disease.”
As Kheesa prepared for the C-section, a nurse attempted to insert an IV, but she struggled, sticking Kheesa six times in both arms and hands.
“Frustrated and in pain, I finally asked her to find someone else. An older nurse came in, showing compassion and understanding,” Kheesa adds.
Instead of immediately inserting the IV, she comforted Kheesa, noting that she had