Why it took 12 years for Savannah to get a diagnosis
https://youtu.be/YEPQd_SpcRg
Savannah Hunt knew at a young age that there was something wrong with her health. The problem was that the doctors could not pinpoint an accurate diagnosis. For 12 years, she was in and out of doctors' offices, labs, imaging studies, and hospitals without ever receiving a diagnosis. She began to think her ailments were normal. That is until a night last year when her kidneys started to fail. 12 years after first being seen for her condition, she learned she had lupus and lupus nephritis. Tara Tingey sat down to interview Savannah about her chronic illness journey. Read the interview below. You can also watch it on YouTube or listen in on your favorite podcast channels.
[00:00:00] Tara: Hi, welcome to Situation Positive, a positive community for those affected by chronic illness. I'm Tara, your positivity partner, and I'm really excited to jump into our interview today, today with Savannah hunt and Savannah, how are you?
[00:00:18] Savannah: Good! Hi!
[00:00:20] Tara: We are so glad that you're here with us. I know a little bit about you just from what you've been posting on social media, but why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself.
[00:00:29] Savannah: Yeah, my name is Savannah Hunt. I live in Arizona, San Tan Valley area. I am 23 years old. I'm married. I have three kids. I have a toddler who's three, and I had had a set of twins for one. So it's definitely busy. There's never a dull moment. They're always running around and into everything. So, yeah. So that's who I am.
That's where I live right now. I have, I just got diagnosed with lupus last was it last week? A couple of weeks ago. I just barely found out that I've been living with lupus all these years and I have lupus nephritis.
[00:01:06] Tara: So you just found this out. So. So to kind of bring us through your story from kind of when you started up until just a few weeks ago when you got your diagnosis.
[00:01:16] Savannah: Yeah. So it's a long story. I'll try to keep it as brief as I can without missing the important details. But, so I started having problems at 11 years old, there was a night where I was playing basketball at church, just with a ton of other young girls. And that night I came home, not feeling well. So I went to bed and I was like, Hey, this is weird.
I don't really feel good in the middle of the night. Like I got this really high fever and my neck was stiff and I had all this joint pain and all my joints started swelling. And I was like, this is, so this is so weird. So my dad took me to the emergency room and they ran all this blood work. We were there till like five in the morning and they were like, oh, we'll just send you to your family doctor.
And I was like, okay, sure, whatever. We go to my family doctor and he's like, oh, I've seen this before you have septic arthritis. And we were like, okay. So he put me on all of these antibiotics. So I was on these shots. Morning and night they gave me shots every day on my bum. So I'd go into the doctor's office twice a day as a young teenager.
So I was 11, 12, 13 when this was all happening around those years. And I would get shots on my booty every day because they thought I had septic arthritis. So I was on this really high dose of antibiotics. So anytime I was on antibiotics, I felt fine, but the minute he took me off the antibiotics, all my swelling came back.
All my joint pain came back. I wasn't sleeping very well at night. I had all this anxiety because I wasn't sleeping and I was like, what's going on? So that kind of happened when I was younger. And then at 14, 15, we were like, okay. Every time we're done with the antibiotics, it comes back and it's not going away.
There's nothing we can do. I saw at that time specialists, but they were like, oh, like there's obviously some type of virus, but we don't know what it is.