A Summary of Sorts

If you're reading my blog you're probably aware that what I have is a disease where my immune system has mistaken my blood vessels as foreign invaders in my body. You probably also know that it sucks.

Vasculitis is a group of diseases that all involve the immune system doing this. In some cases the immune system tends to decide that it has a favorite type of blood vessel that it likes to attack. Sometimes these are the large arteries and in other diseases the immune system decides to go for the smallest capillaries. The type that I have sits right in the middle and goes for everything from the capillaries up to the small arteries. So, it won't go for things like my aorta, but it will go for the artery that attaches to my kidneys. It will also go for all the smaller vessels down to the capillaries.

I was never really given a specific diagnosis; they know it's vasculitis, and they know it's one of the three that are ANCA associated, but because I didn't have a biopsy they can't get anymore specific than that. .My doctors and I have decided to lean more towards Granulomatosis with Polyangiitis because that's more in line with the symptoms I've shown, but the ANCA I show is the one that leans more towards Microscopic Polyangiitis.

Hey, in one post you've now pretty much caught up the main summary of my blog! Congratulations!