It was like somebody's stabbing on the side of the head with an ice pick, and everything sort of went blurry.

The disease is like a crow flying through the dark night.

Patients go months or years incurring damage in all of these organs.

How do you identify something you can't see.

Going to the emergency room, They're not going to do anything for me.

I've done that before.

I've gone to see culp and I'm just pushed aside.

Something you know is there but can't trace.

That's what I knew.

I couldn't control, and that's what I knew.

You have a disease of some sort.

I couldn't explain it, A threat always lurking under the surface.

I'm Lauren bray pacheco host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast where we investigate the nature of rare conditions, shape shifting diseases, and the extraordinary lengths patients will go in search of a diagnosis.

I didn't have the answer yet.

I was terrified of the unknown.

It's like the mystery of a lifetime.

This season, Symptomatic follows people who refuse to give up their search for answers, leaving no stone unturned to uncover the truth behind their symptoms.

So I just decided I have to fix this.

And this is my life, and this is something I've been struggling with for for too long.

If you're looking at it without understanding the disease, you're just looking at a collection of symptoms that aren't connected.

For the first time, it occurred to me, maybe this is all sort of one thing.

I'm not afraid to stand up for myself.

We're starting to realize that there's so much more underneath the surface that we didn't see before.

Join us for all new episodes where we dive into the medical unknown to investigate the mysteries of chronic illness.

Whatever this is.

It's killing me and I need to know what it is.

I wasn't ready to die.

This is symptomatic.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the stories that matter to you.