Mitch: I'm from Montana originally. I live there now. Pretty much a jack of all trades done construction from the ground up, farming, had my own businesses. My dogs are my children. We've got four in the house.
2020 I was working 60 hours a day, I was doing a second story remodel on an office building. And every step up and down the stairs and doing the floor hurt and my legs burned. And weeks later it didn't go away and a week later it didn't go away. And I just kept thinking, the next week I'm going to get enough energy.
I got all kinds of things I'd have hadn't had heart burns and my body went weird for sure. At that point, I was throwing up a lot and I just associated it with stress and nerves. My feet of swell to the point I can't walk. Hips, knees, elbows, shoulders, all my fingers, my spine from my tailbone all the way up feels like somebody hit it with a hammer.
The inflammation has been consistent for 20 years. I developed psoriasis with it, so from my waist down was covered in scales and psoriasis. And so with all of that, I had constant itching, constant pain. I've laid on the ground and wished I would die, couldn't get up, didn't want to get up.
And finally it got to the point where I walked into a doctor's office. and I begged for help. I needed to know what was going on.
SLATE: Immunoglobulin G4-related disease, or IgG4-RD, is a chronic, systemic, inflammatory disease that can affect nearly any, and often multiple, organs of the body.
It is characterized by silent, ongoing organ damage and recurrent disease flares causing accelerated and irreversible damage to previously affected and new organs.
Mitch: My internal organs, kidney, bladder, urethra, scrotum, anus, all that is been affected and flares up. And through that process, the dealing with the pain is one of the hardest things because of the system and the way it works and the pain issues that go along with it.
It's almost every part of my body. I believe it's affected as far as diagnosis and doctors seeing it there.
I can remember when I was healthy, and I can remember when nothing hurt and everything worked for the most part. And I can remember for the first few things when the joints started swelling or and I thought I could fix it. I thought I could make it go away, you know, I thought it would get better.
As bad as it is to go through all the things, I'm still alive. I think they keep me alive. And then it's got to be a point where I have answers to my disease. I know what it is now. And I can, for me, knowledge is the power that I need to understand. I might not know, say, take that knowledge and go down the same path as everybody. But it helps my mind understand what's going on. So now I have the knowledge. I know what it is. I can face it, tackle it, you know, it's hard to fight an invisible demon.
And I'm excited to give it a go and then take that energy and go out in the world and see where it takes me.
Just spread that love and energy and positivity and message of hope to people that are out there that, you know, you can it can all be horrible and it can all be miserable and it can get better.
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