Patient Stories: Margo McSwain
Pediatrician Margo McSwain has had a long — sometimes agonizing — journey through the difficult disease called systemic lupus. After years of serious medical issues, McSwain received her diagnosis in 2002. “I remembered a 17-year-old patient of mine diagnosed with lupus in 1985,” McSwain says. “And finally everything I had been experiencing made sense.” Dangerous complications of the disease, which causes the patient’s immune system to attack major organs throughout the body, had sent McSwain to the hospital more than once. In 2004, her lupus flared once again and she was ultimately hospitalized with acute renal failure and fluid in her lungs that restricted her breathing. After surgery at the Washington Hospital Center for a ruptured heart valve and a three-month stay, McSwain was sent to NRH for inpatient rehabilitation to learn to walk and talk all over again. But in 2005 when she was eager to return to work, her doctor recommended outpatient care from NRH to deal with some cognitive deficits and mild speech aphasia that had resulted from her illness and treatment. “I had to re-teach my brain to find the right words,” McSwain says. “And my therapist Brooke Hatfield was wonderful. She taught me skills and how to use techniques for word recall. I had 12 sessions, one each week, and she was terrific, truly listening to me, encouraging me, trying one new technique and then another. In fact, all of the care at NRH was compassionate and top rate. My father was a patient there as well, after an auto accident, and he had loved everyone at NRH, too.” Today, Dr. McSwain works part-time as a pediatric consultant, raising her two teenage sons, and dealing with a chronic disease with no cure. “There are good days and bad, but my speech is much improved — and everyday I still use the techniques I learned in outpatient therapy at NRH.”