Sarcoidosis

Somewhere deep inside your body, small nodules are forming. Clusters of immune cells closing ranks into tiny fortresses — medicine calls them granulomas. They often sit in the lungs, sometimes in the lymph nodes, in the skin, in the eyes, more rarely in the heart or other organs. Your immune system has decided to wall something in. Something it cannot cope with. Something it cannot dissolve — yet refuses to leave alone.

Medicine knows surprisingly little about the actual cause. A pathogen? A genetic predisposition? An overreactive immune response to something that is essentially harmless? Research is still groping its way forward. What it cannot answer: Why now? Why you? And why does your system respond as though it needs to encapsulate something it does not understand?