Five years ago, Marta Rode had an idea.
She imagined Jasperites walking around town in their pyjamas to raise awareness about autoimmune disease. It was 2012 and it had been a year since she was in the thick of her own autoimmune crisis, struggling with a Wegener’s granulomatosis diagnosis.
Wegener’s is a rare autoimmune disease, affecting one in 40,000 people; it’s incurable and life-threatening and requires long-term immunosuppression through the use of powerful medication or chemotherapy.
After spending months in her pyjamas, often looking like herself, but never feeling like herself, she wanted to do something to raise awareness about autoimmune disease—of which there are 150—and to start a conversation about finding the common thread that links them all.
Autoimmune disease—lupus, Crohn’s, rheumatoid arthritis and hyperthyroidism, to name a few—causes the body’s immune system to attack the very organs it is meant to protect.
One in five people have one.
“If you look at four people around you one of you at sometime in your journey will have an AI disease,” said Rode.
She admited she didn’t know anything about autoimmune disease before she was diagnosed despite the fact that her mom has fibromyalgia, her dad has lupus and her sister has psoriatic arthritis.
It took Rode months before she was correctly diagnosed with Wegener’s, having first been told it was stage-two lung cancer, and throughout the process, she became more and more infuriated.
She felt she wasn’t being heard by her doctors and she wanted to do something to help others who suffer with autoimmune disease. So, in 2012, she started PJ Day and the Find The Common Thread Foundation.
Five years later, she said she’s sick of talking about the disease, instead she wants to focus on something positive.
“This year I want the whole event to be about healing, rather than about the disease,” she said.
To make that possible—and to celebrate PJ Day’s five-year anniversary—Rode is turning the one-day event into a month long awareness campaign, with events taking place throughout the month of March.
But, as always, the event will kick off on Feb. 29—World Rare Disease Day. On Monday, Rode asks that everyone wear their favourite PJs, whether you’re going to work, heading to a yoga class, crushing pow on the ski hill or sitting around at home. She also asks that you take part in a PJ march through town.
The parade will begin at the visitor information centre shortly after noon.
Last year, more than 600 people signed-in at the march and it was estimated a few hundred more joined the crowd along the route.
For more information about PJ Day, as well as the continually evolving schedule of events for the month of March, visit www.findthecommonthread.com.
Some of the events include a wellness weekend at The Chateau Jasper from March 12–13, a PJ art workshop presented by the Jasper Artist Guild highlighting the healing nature of art March 18, and a onesie party at the Jasper Legion with live music and prizes on March 26.
Nicole Veerman [email protected]
