“ can be a very terrible multi-system disease, but not in every patient,” Dr. Fred Wigley, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, has studied scleroderma for the past 45 years. Many patients with chronic illnesses such as autoimmune diseases go years without a diagnosis, until their symptoms become severe enough to be diagnosed.ĭr. Gay’s frustrating journey to diagnosis is no outlier in the chronic illness community. They named everything except what it was.” She went to regular medical doctors that said that it could be lupus, it could be mental illness, it could be Epstein-Barr.
Her brother Bob had commented on his sister’s diagnosis journey, saying: “She had a lot of fatigue…it felt like her skin was on fire. She had suffered from unrelenting symptoms for years before her diagnosis, however, but doctors couldn’t pinpoint the cause. Gay was diagnosed with scleroderma at age 44, a mere three years before her passing. The condition was scleroderma, and it was responsible for the passing of his older sister Gay Saget at the young age of 47. Image courtesy of the Scleroderma Foundation.īob Saget, the beloved Full House actor who recently passed away, battled against a little-known autoimmune disease prior to his passing. Actor Bob Saget was an advocate for scleroderma research, raising over $25 million to find a cure.
