Linda Danielson poses for a photo at her home in Paradise, Tuesday, June 19, 2012.
Ravell Call, Deseret News
LOGAN — It was two days before her first and most critical chemotherapy treatment and Linda Danielson was visiting other patients at the hospital, handing out small gifts she had gathered prior to being admitted.
The tokens of kindness served as a diversion to a recent diagnosis of a rare and potentially deadly disease. Danielson, a retired nurse, was trying to deal with what was to come.
"Even when I was the sickest, I was trying to think of others and it helped," she said. "Little tiny things like that, when you go into a very scary situation, it can help you instead of just laying there and thinking about how sick you are and wondering if you are going to die."
At that point more than a year ago, Danielson didn't realize how important her positive mindset would be in getting her through what ended up being months in the hospital. Helping others has now given her life new meaning.
Deadly diagnosis
In the past two years, 59-year-old Danielson had gone through myriad medical tests. The elusive and mysterious sickness had attacked her heart, liver, kidneys, nerves, gastrointestinal tract and thyroid. Weight was "literally falling off me," she said, recounting a sudden 35-pound drop.
"I felt like my world was upside-down," Danielson said. "As sick as I was, I really wondered if I was going to die."
Doctors couldn't pinpoint a cause, and her "list of 18, odd things that had changed in the last two years," including constipation, anemia, unusual fatigue, nausea and severe back pain, wasn't helping to draw any conclusions for a variety of specialists who had become involved in her treatment.
"They didn't know what they were looking for so they didn't see it, but it was there clear back then," she said. "I was dying in front of my doctors' eyes and they couldn't find out what was going on."
Ultimately, a precautionary kidney biopsy revealed primary systemic amyloidosis, a rare disease that results from problems with plasma cells cloning themselves and leaving protein deposits within vital organs, said Dr. Finn B. Petersen, a hematologist and oncologist at LDS Hospital.
The head of the hospital's bone marrow transplant program said amyloidosis impacts only a few thousand people across the country each year, with most victims of the disease in their 40s or 50s. Amyloidosis is in the same family as multiple myeloma, but does not grow or expand like the cancer does in the bone marrow.
