Life Coach and best-selling author, Gabi Lowe, lost her daughter, Jenna Lowe, in 2015 to a disease called Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Lowe says being a life coach was a massive career shift after she lost her daughter. Jenna was first diagnosed when she was 16, after being a healthy, fit, normal, and active young child. Lowe says she started showing signs of breathlessness. She says the problem is, Pulmonary Hypertension (HP) goes undiagnosed on a regular basis. Lowe says raising awareness for the disease is absolutely essential because without early diagnosis and early treatment, a patient’s life is shortened and the quality of their life is greatly changed.

“A lot of the medications for pulmonary hypertension are not registered in South Africa so the fight now is to continue to fight to get those medications registered and to get them in at a reasonable cost. I think it's abominable that patients need to pay outrageous amounts of money for life-saving medication,” says Lowe.

“Advocacy is absolutely vital. You need to fight for yourself, because it is a little-known illness. If you have signs of breathlessness, tiredness, and you don’t know what’s wrong you have to push through to find a diagnosis. Go to a pulmonologist and keep searching, don’t take no for an answer or we don’t know what this is. Once you have affirmed diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, it has been proven all over the world that triple therapy is the best kind of therapy. So the next fight is getting the medication that you need. So ensure you are with a good medical aid and fight for the medication that you need,” says Lowe.

OFM News/Blaine Jones