Hi, my name is Ebony.
I'm 40 years old.
I've had HS since 2010,
so it's been about close to 15 years that I've been living with this disease.
Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast.
I'm Dr.
Neha Bhattuk, WebMD's chief physician editor for health and lifestyle medicine.
My symptoms first started in maybe September.
I kept having what I thought was like a couple reoccurring boils.
And so I made the appointment with a dermatologist, but it was a couple weeks before I could get in.
And I noticed that these bumps were just getting worse.
If you've ever dealt with recurring painful bumps,
boils or abscesses in sensitive areas on your body, like your underarms,
groin area, or beneath your breasts, you may have wondered, is this just a really bad case of acne?
Or is this something more?
And what can I do to heal it and prevent it from happening again?
googling around and he was
like I think you might have this it kind of looks like this at that time all the pictures were of basically white people that had HS and so I was like mine looks slightly different but maybe it could be that it's gotten much better now but back then in 2010 I didn't think a lot of Black people had HS.
It just wasn't shown.
So now when you Google, you should see all different skin tones.