Mahsa Pazokifard, who lives in Orange County, California, was diagnosed with IgG4-related disease in 2022. She explains how years of overlooked symptoms and dismissive care made connecting her medical history — and getting a diagnosis — incredibly difficult.
Transcript
I’m really only now able to connect everything in my medical history, because it took so long to actually connect the dots. It wasn’t until I was in university when things got really rough. My bronchitis even got worse. I was coughing up blood. I was constantly in and out of the ER, and they would just say, “It’s stress. It’s hormones. You’re dehydrated.”
I remember telling them, “Hey, I drink a lot of water, by the way.” And their response was always, “Good! That’s really good.” But nobody was actually asking, “Hey, how much water do you drink?” For me to say, “At least a gallon — sometimes up to two.”
I had come to know that I had cysts, tumors, masses, nodules — but everything was always considered too small, or assumed to be benign. They don’t know to check for certain things. They just follow the cancer protocols they have on hand. No matter what else you tell them, they say, “We’ve got to check this list of 100 things first before we can actually listen to what you’re telling us.”
I woke up one day in March 2022, and my eyes were shut. My bloodwork will always tell you I’m fine. My vitals when I’m sitting will always tell you I’m fine. And yet my body is failing at the same time.
You go into the doctor’s office, and not only do they say “stress” or “hormones” because you’re a female — they were also thinking I was crazy. They were deeming me unfit.
When you have autonomic dysfunction, nobody really knows how to handle that. And that’s what was happening. That made it really difficult to get a diagnosis.
