Her Illness
Sandy was diagnosed five years ago with interstitial lung disease (ILD). Unfortunately, there is no cure for ILD. It basically is scarring of the lung tissue. How you get it is not known as it can be triggered by many things. In her case, it was thought that it was untreated pneumonia but there is no way to know. Once the scarring starts, you can't stop it. The lungs try to fix themselves but the more they try the more scar tissue they end up creating so the problem just gets worse. As the scar tissue build up, less oxygen could get into the lungs. The treatment is just to slow it down as much as possible or to get a lung transplant. Unfortunately, by the time Mayo Clinic accepted her for an evaluation for a lung transplant it was too late. Her other organs and body were too weak. Her heart was already pumping overtime to compensate for her lungs. The hard part is you didn't see it from the outside. She tried to hide that as much as she could. Even in the transplant unit, as she was applying makeup before the doctors came in, we had to remind her "it's okay to look sick here."
She hated being dependent on the oxygen tanks. Who wouldn't? I remember when the movie "Fault of our Stars" came out, she hoped it might result in oxygen tanks having less of a stigma. (If you haven't seen the movie, the 16-year old star is on oxygen due to cancer. Great movie, but have some tissues close by.)
So between being tired and having to tote the tanks, she didn't go out much. But once she did, she loved it. On a recent visit she joined us at the airshow at NAS Jax. She was sitting on a ledge with her tank waiting for us to get the car. While there, an elderly couple walked by and the gentleman looked at her, noticed her breathing tubes and said to her "you know, you are beautiful". It made her day.
Sandy always was and still is beautiful - inside and out.