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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

Gina gripped my hand tightly and glanced up at me. She must have known exactly what was going through my head.

There were over a hundred different autoimmune diseases, but there was only one I cared about.

Multiple sclerosis.

52

52

quito, ecuador
february 22, 9:18 a.m.

Daniel Sewall was checking his email at a small café. It had been six days since he’d last had an internet connection, and his inbox was full. There were a bunch of emails from Lauren. She worked in Human Resources at Belippa, the company his father founded, and was still technically his current employer. Daniel was on leave, or sabbatical, or whatever you want to call bouncing around the jungles of South America for nine months.

There was an email from his father, and Daniel clicked it open. It was the usual small talk: what his father had been up to over the last week, a big fundraiser where he met Barack Obama, how he shot an 82 during a golf tournament, and how he was considering asking his personal trainer out on a date.

Daniel responded to his father’s email, pleading with him to ask his trainer out, then he recounted his latest venture into the Ecuadorian Amazon and the different soil samples he’d taken.

Daniel Sewall hadn’t always intended on going into the family business. In fact, he’d been leaning toward studying economics, much like his godfather had, but when his mother died, that all changed. Daniel decided he would find a cure for cancer so no one would have to feel the same pain he felt watching his mother wither away.

He had studied microbiology at UCLA, then, after graduating, taken a research position with Belippa. He confined his research to cancer for the first two years, but then, at the age of twenty-four, Daniel’s skin began to turn red and scaly in several places, and he was experiencing intense joint pain. After a positive ANA (antinuclear antibody) test, he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease: psoriatic arthritis.

Autoimmune diseases are characterized by an immune response that mistakenly attacks your body. The immune system normally guards against foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses by sending out an army of fighter cells, or antibodies, to attack them. But with an autoimmune disease, the immune system falsely identifies part of the human body as one of these foreign invaders and releases proteins called autoantibodies that attack these healthy cells. This results in either tissue-specific or systemic inflammation.

In Daniel’s case, his body was attacking his skin cells and joint tissues.

Daniel was prescribed Mireva, the medicine that had made his father’s company so much money over the past decade and a half.