Harlingen teen athlete planning comeback after juvenile arthritis diagnosis
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Juliana Garcia had set big goals for herself to play varsity soccer at Harlingen High School this past season.
Garcia, 15, played a few pre-season scrimmages.
“The last scrimmage is when I started feeling sick. I had a fever that day,” Garcia recalled.
That fever persisted for weeks.
“I would get chills really bad, and then I would just get really hot all of a sudden,” Garcia said.
As days went by, more symptoms —from swollen nymph nodes to intense rashes — began adding up.
“And I just kept itching, I just did not feel good at all that day,” Garcia recalled. “I told my mom ‘I can't do this anymore. I want it to stop.’”
Once Garcia’s symptoms worsened, she was forced to miss school for over a month. Her parents began taking her to several different doctors and hospitals hoping to find answers.
“My ankles were also inflamed, I just couldn't walk at all,” Garcia said.
Garcia’s father, Juan, said he felt helpless seeing his daughter go through that.
“As a parent, you don't want to think that something is wrong… but it was always in the back of my mind,” Juan said.
After running a full panel, doctors saw Garcia’s ferritin levels — the amount of iron your body stores — were very high.
High levels of it can be seen in a form of arthritis called juvenile idiopathic arthritis that’s found in children.
Garcia’s levels were at 31,000.
“We try to look for a ferritin level that's between 100 or 200,” sports and pain medicine physician Dr. Sujan Gogu, DO said. “It's not a marker we typically use for pro-inflammatory states, but for whatever reason in JIA, it is quite elevated."
Although Dr. Gogu did not treat Garcia, he said he’s seen cases of JIA in the Valley. It can be tricky to identify JIA because other illnesses have similar symptoms
Once Garcia officially got her JIA diagnosis in January 2023, she began treatment at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston.
Her treatment consisted of daily injections of a medication that treats rheumatoid arthritis inflammation.
After seeing some improvement, Garcia is now on monthly injections and she's working to be back on the soccer field next season.
She appeared in a junior varsity game at the end of the previous season.
“It was really hard to come back, but it felt good,” Garcia said. “It proved to me that I could just overcome a lot of stuff and it's not going to hold me back.”
Garcia is sharing her story in hopes of shedding light on the condition.
“It's a really long process, especially if they don't find it out right away,” Garcia said. “But it'll eventually get better, and you just have to keep pushing through it."
Watch the video above for the full story.
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