UNDER ATTACK

Scientists are beginning to unlock the mystery of why the immune system goes rogue and attacks healthy cells in the body, causing a potentially fatal autoimmune disease.

- EVA-MARIA BOBBERT

What would you do if you were told you had just six months left to live? For Indie Lee, mother of two young children at the time, there had long been signs that something was amiss, including an autoimmune diagnosis (rheumatoid arthritis), early menopause at 36, and a sudden loss of peripheral vision in her left eye. But that life-changing call from her doctor came while she was in the car on an everyday errand: Her MRI had revealed a fatal brain tumour.

“That drive was the most impactful 15 minutes of my life,” says Indie. “I realised I had spent the entirety of my adult life as a passenger and not the driver. I was going through the motions, doing what I thought was expected of me. It was in that 15-minute drive that I created the three Ps of how I would live each day forward – with purpose, passion, and being fully present.”

Miraculously, that was 15 years ago. Having found a surgeon who was willing to operate (the odds were not in Indie’s favour), she not only survived but thrived, going on to conceive and create a highly successful global skincare line, Indie Lee. Curiously, her tumour wasn’t cancerous – her doctors believe it is autoimmune related, meaning her immune system had attacked healthy cells in her body.

“Autoimmune diseases have no boundaries to who they hit and when, but 80 per cent of those living with them are women,” says Indie, now a board member of the Autoimmune Association in the US (autoimmune. org). “My doctors will never definitively know the cause.”

Although some autoimmune conditions are well known – type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis, for example – many we know very little about.