I received an email from a reader who was just diagnosed with cardiac sarcoidosis. He said he was having a hard time dealing with the diagnosis and he read a statistic that patients with cardiac sarcoidosis have a life span of five years, and he wanted to know how much time my doctors had given me to live. Here is my open reply to him.

Dear “Worried Reader”

Thank you for your email and for your kind words of encouragement about my blog. I am sorry that you have developed sarcoidosis, and that the diagnosis is causing such an upheaval in your life. A diagnosis of any chronic disease is life changing, but I think more so when no one can explain how we get it, or that it is incurable. The good thing is that it is controllable.

You said you read the statistic that cardiac sarcoidosis patients…