Finding Strength — Lisa Weber

Finding Strength

Lisa Weber lives in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, where she works hard at being a wife and mother of two beautiful girls. She’s passionate about overcoming challenges while living with a rare autoimmune disease called scleroderma. This systemic disease attacks her entire body inside and out. Her diagnosis came in 2014, but she continues doing the things she loves: working as a client success manager, cooking (poorly), building furniture, and jogging (slowly). She will tell you everything she does is perfectly imperfect! One of her life goals is to help raise awareness for rare diseases and continue her personal fight to survive and thrive until a cure is found.
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The best scleroderma caregiver knows when to just love me

We toasted to 18 years as a married couple while looking out over Tampa Bay, Florida. My amazing husband, Ross, had planned out every detail, from the surprise dinner reservations in the city to the romantic sunset-watching at the park. If you know me, you know pulling off a surprise…

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This Rare Disease Day, I’m Asking Others to Help Us Be Less Rare

“You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” Brené Brown said these words, but they belong to my heart. The last day of February is dedicated to raising awareness for rare diseases. Rare Disease Day helps people who live with incredible…

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How to Endure the Torture of Esophageal Testing

When something gets stuck in your throat, you’ll do everything imaginable to dislodge it. That’s why when someone intentionally threads a tube through your nose and down your esophagus, you really have to fight all of your basic instincts that want to remove it. Scleroderma can wreak havoc on the…

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When My Disease Attacks, I Press the Reset Button and Move Forward

There’s an ugly truth about chronic illness. It hides from the rest of the world behind closed doors. Only caregivers and those suffering truly understand.  It’s the suffering that happens when people are forced to mourn the life that was stolen from them. And it’s the…

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Acknowledging That This Time, I Need Help

Sometimes life deals a hand that tests us. We then look for ways to overcome those challenges. But what do we do when the bad news keeps coming? How do we keep moving forward when we feel like more weights than we can carry have been placed upon our shoulders?…

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Meds or No Meds?

I used to save my empty pill bottles, thinking a Pinterest craft would catch my eye and I would have a good use for my vast collection of rusty-colored medicine containers. Instead, my stockpile grew so rapidly I had no choice but to give in and trash them. Unless I…

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My Diagnosis Was Gut-wrenching, but Life Gets Better

The phone rang on a Friday night. I answered it thinking the call probably was from another annoying solicitor. Instead, it was the voice of the person who would introduce me to my disorder. The nurse told that me my tests had come in, and I had scleroderma. Finding answers…

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Learning How to Recharge After Trauma

Coming home from the hospital should be a time of smiles and celebration — especially after surviving multiple strokes and spending nearly a week in the ICU, as I recently did. But isn’t life always more complicated than we expect? The fact that I’m alive is remarkable. And having…

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I’m Stronger Than Scleroderma

Who am I? On some days, I don’t know how to answer that question. But I can tell you with certainty that I am not defined by my autoimmune disease. Scleroderma, my systemic enemy, is trying to destroy me. Every day it does its best to damage my…

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