2023 Year in Review Video | National Jewish Health

Ladies and gentlemen, now announcing the amazing, the one and only,

Ella Basham.

I used to put on productions and I was always the star of the show.

She just loves to sing, loves being a performer.

Ella makes a lot of hard things look easy.

She'll hear a song one time and be able to sing it on her own.

The funny thing I think about growing up with severe asthma

is that you don't really realize that you can't breathe until you can.

When I have asthma attacks, I get a ringing in my ears, my vision blurs,

I can't breathe at all.

Sometimes those asthma attacks took me out for like days.

I was diagnosed with pneumonia in January of 2020, got diagnosed again,

and to me it seemed like super strange to have pneumonia that many times.

We were at a friend's house, but I couldn't even say my name to new people

without getting out of breath.

I was like, hey, I've got to go to the hospital.

And I started having every CT scan, every MRI.

The doctor team in Illinois started to realize this could be eGPA.

They made it sound like one of the scariest things you could possibly have.

Once they told me it was eGPA, told me things that were going to happen,

being on high dosages of steroids,

one of the doctors had said, hey, you're going to gain a ton of weight

no matter what you do.

Chris went from being a active father and husband

to being a completely different person.

And it felt like he was just disappearing.

His skin was gray.

You could tell his breathing was labored.

I wondered if he was going to die.

I tried searching and ran into these videos by Michael Wexler

from National Jewish Health about eGPA.

I emailed him and he just said, I have a trial coming up.

I'll see if I can get him into it.

I couldn't believe it.

I called Chris the next day and I was like, you need to go to National Jewish Health.

I think Bruce Springsteen said it really, really well.

He said, imagine if you can write something

that in three minutes and 20 seconds will change somebody's life.

And I think that's the beauty of music.

About 2010, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia

and given a very small chance of survival.

But I got a bone marrow transplant from my sister who saved my life.

And there was a lot of complications with that.

But the real complication came in about 2018

when I discovered the interstitial lung disease.

You fell in love, I was too soon.

I went in for just a standard physical.

Doctor said, OK, yeah, we'll do a lung x-ray.

And it came back and he said, do you have fibrosis tissue in your lungs?

He called it ground glass tissue.

And he said, I want you to go over to National Jewish and do a workup.

Chris's case is particularly difficult.

His lung disease is a form of progressive pulmonary fibrosis.

And it's likely a complication of the treatment for his leukemia.

And that treatment can injure the lungs.

There were no treatments to slow the progression for the most common form of pulmonary fibrosis.

And then two drugs were approved here at National Jewish Health.

In Chris's case, he's taking a medication that slows down the scar tissue deposition in his lung.

So that allows him to maintain his fitness and his current quality of life.

I'm walking four miles today.

There's a path that goes out on the north side of the suburbs.

My view is incredible.

And I guess it's a feeling that we are just passing through.