How to Start A Fashion Brand While Battling A Rare Disease??

jadeng2
Feb 6, 2022
3 min read

by: JaDen Greene

February 6, 2022

A Little Deep For the Intro...

Doctor visits, college due dates, and a ounce of depersonalization symptoms are just some of the everyday things I have to deal with on this journey we call life. Regardless of all my trials and tribulations, I am a senior at the University of South Carolina Beaufort graduating in April along with a few job/internship offers. Nevertheless, I'm getting ahead of myself. So, allow me to take you through a brief recap of how I got here.

The Beginning...

Every year, a week before school started my school would take all new cadets to be trained by JROTC faculty and volunteering cadets on a military base in Columbia, South Carolina. You know, regular military school things. Pressing forward, during the summer of 2015, I decided to attend the camp as a volunteer cadet leader. Leading up to camp, I noticed that my voice was "raspy", but I just assumed it was a sore throat so I didn't pay it any mind. When time came to go to camp, my voice had yet to return, but the JROTC instructors still allowed me to go to camp since I wasn't coughing or showing any symptoms of having a sore throat, (besides not being able to speak normally).

A month has passed since camp, and my voice has yet to returned. I noticed that I have been having difficulty swallowing after eating, walking normal speeds, keeping up during physical activities, and lifting my neck off of flat surfaces. As you may have suspected, I started to freak out. All kinds of thoughts are going through my head at this point, "will I be able to talk again? will my girlfriend leave me? do I have to learn sign language?". When I finally told my mom that the situation was getting problematic, that lead to countless trips to the ENT doctor. I was going to the doctor so much, that it got to a point to where getting a camera shoved down my nose and in the back of my throat was normal.

The Diagnosis...

A month and a half later, (it's December now), my mom received a call from the ENT office telling her to take me into the hospital immediately. After being omitted in the hospital, and having multiple blood and physical test ran on me, the team of doctors assigned to me finally agreed on my diagnosis. "Miller Fisher Guillain-Barré Syndrome" is what they said I have.

What is it...?

For those of you that may be aware, Miller Fisher syndrome (MFS) is a rare acquired nerve disease related to Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). Features include weakness of the eye muscles causing difficulty moving the eyes; impaired limb coordination and unsteadiness; and absent tendon reflexes, (rarediseases.org). Being that I was still high school, the severity of the situation hadn't fully hit me. It wasn't until I'd gotten older and realized how much harder communicating with people had become, which lead to me having a "mid life crisis" moment in life. I would constantly find myself worrying about getting a job, making friends, building connections, how would life be 20 years from now, etc. I hate to admit it, but that way way of thinking eventually lead me to a depressed and isolated state of living. I'd given up on life, and accepted whatever life threw at me with no resistance.

Overcoming The Struggle...

As I previously stated, I was depressed and isolating myself from the world. This would last from high school graduation - sophomore year in college. Being diagnosed with something like MFS GBS isn't easy, especially when it alters your way of life so drastically. But, with;

the unconditional love from family and friends
a firm spiritual background / belief system
and the drive to want to do and be better

anything is possible.

My entrepreneurial journey started when a friend of mine introduce me to these guys who had their own clothing company. Since three out of four of us were roommates, I hung around them and studied how they would do things. Mostly everything was done "in house", the photography, videography, marketing, even the product design was done on adobe photoshop. The creative control was something that grabbed my attention instantly. After spending time watching them and participating in their projects, I started thinking about ways I could do the same thing with a brand of my own but with a purpose.

This eventually lead to me starting my first business, which I will get into in the next segment of "Behind The Scenes at SeTu Clothing Co".