Jennifer Matthews: Edjuana Ross can once again enjoy shopping -- after beating lupus. She battled the disease for more than a decade. Edjuana Ross Had lupus.
Edjuana Ross: Extreme joint pain, and every single day, sick and tired.
Jennifer Matthews: Lupus attacked her immune system and scarred her face. It damaged her heart and caused three strokes. The treatment was almost as hard as the disease. Cortisone caused her to gain 100 pounds!
Edjuana Ross: It took a lot for me just to get out of bed.
Jennifer Matthews: Edjuana's doctor, Richard Burt from Northwestern memorial hospital, recommended an adult stem-cell transplant. The goal? To fix her immune system.
Dr. Richard Burt: What we're doing is rebooting the computer. So the computer's gone on the blitz. And we've rebooted it and now its working.
Jennifer Matthews: First, patients have blood removed to harvest the stem cells. Next, chemotherapy destroys the existing, "broken" immune system. Patients are then given stem cells to build a new immune system.
Dr. Richard Burt: The patients we've treated, many of them have their lives back.
Jennifer Matthews: In Doctor Burt's study, about half of patients who have the procedure are now lupus-free. Edjuana is one of them.
Edjuana Ross: It changed my life and it made my life better, and it made me appreciate a lot of other things.
Jennifer Matthews: Slimmed down and feeling better, Edjuana is now looking forward to her future -- one free of lupus.
This is Jennifer Matthews reporting.
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