I’m Aware That I’m Rare: Michelle Sweitzer (298)

The phaware® interview

In this episode, pulmonary hypertension patient, Michelle Sweitzer discusses her illness and why she chose to adopt.

My name is Michelle Sweitzer. My connection to PH started many years ago. I had a brother that was diagnosed when he was almost five and passed away shortly after. At that time, there was no treatments or anything like that. Then 11 years later, my dad was diagnosed, and as a result, the rest of my brothers and I all got tested to see if we had the disease. I had another brother that at that time was asymptomatic, but diagnosed, and myself and another brother of mine were not. We were fine at that moment, but later came to find out that when they said it’s not the gene, that we in fact had BMPR2. So, with that, came different things that we needed to do to try to help if there was a way to keep the PH from activating, so to speak, being the triggers. One of those was pregnancy.

So, when I got married in 1989, my husband and I decided that pregnancy wasn’t something we really wanted to venture into since we knew…