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From Bethesda Magazine: A surprising diagnosis led a local doctor to study her own disease

Marcela Ferrada studies her rare inflammatory disease at NIH

By

Kathleen Neary

April 17, 2026 3:00 p.m. | Updated: April 15, 2026 10:17 a.m.

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For years, Marcela Ferrada tried to ignore her pain. A runner who competed in half-marathons, Ferrada’s joints would hurt and she would have episodes she calls “weird.” There was a week when she couldn’t really move her hands. She had several miscarriages and each time would chalk up the strange symptoms she had afterward to hormonal changes. In 2012, Ferrada was an infectious disease fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine when she developed a problem with her pancreas that took a month to get over. “I was sick for a long time. I just didn’t tell anybody because I guess you’re in denial because you don’t want to be sick, right?” she says. She figured she didn’t need to see a doctor—she was a doctor.  

Ferrada, 46, who lives in Bethesda, was raised in Colombia by her father, a trauma surgeon, and her mother, a labor and delivery nurse. “I basically grew up around the hospitals,” Ferrada says. She attended medical school in Colombia and did her residency in internal medicine in Miami. That’s where she met her husband, Mark Hofmeyer, a transplant cardiologist.  

Fascinated by infectious disease and critical care, Ferrada did a four-year fellowship that combined the two specialties at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda and at Hopkins.  

In 2013, she became pregnant and told herself the aches and pains were part of pregnancy. She started losing weight after her daughter, Sophia, was born and often had a fever and a bad cough. She was taking Tylenol regularly. Doctors thought it was asthma and gave her a steroid, which helped while she was taking it, but the symptoms returned when she stopped. “I just started having a tremendous amount of fatigue,” Ferrada says, which seemed to make sense with a new baby. She pushed through and ran a half-marathon when Sophia was 4 months old. She felt awful during the race and figured she was out of shape. The cough that wouldn’t go away must be allergies, she decided. 

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“I started coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing, up to the point that I broke two ribs,” she says. Her colleagues at NIH, where Ferrada had accepted a position in critical care, urged her to stop explaining away her symptoms. In 2015, she made an appointment with Dr. James Katz, a rheumatologist at NIH. “I was just feeling so weird telling him my symptoms, because I thought that I sounded crazy. … And then I said, ‘Well, that’s it, so I don’t know. I mean, you may be thinking that I am just imagining all of this.’ And he’s like, ‘No, you’re very sick.’ ” Katz diagnosed her with relapsing polychondritis (RP), a rare inflammatory disease that is systemic and can cause damage to cartilage and other tissues. 

Learning as much as she could about the disease became her mission. “The only thing that kept me waking up in the morning was reading about this and then writing. I wrote a protocol to study the disease at NIH,” she says.  

Ferrada wanted to help others who have RP, which she believes is underdiagnosed because doctors don’t always know to look for it. “I realized that I didn’t have the knowledge to help patients with this because I wasn’t a rheumatologist, and if I really wanted to make this better and study it, I needed to be a rheumatologist. So I got into rheumatology at NIH,” she says. 

Ferrada helped start the first prospective study in the world of patients with RP, which included a series of planned questions for patients to be asked at their doctor visits; previous studies looked back at medical records or asked people about their history in surveys. As part of the study, Ferrada and her colleagues discovered VEXAS syndrome, a rare autoinflammatory genetic disease.

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In the years since getting her RP diagnosis, Ferrada has had many periods of being sick. In September 2022, she started having strange symptoms, including changes in her behavior, such as her bathing regimen. “I usually take a shower twice per day. I decided that I was going to find out how many days you could [go] without taking a shower,” she says. Additionally, she says, “My tongue was paralyzed, and then my eye was paralyzed.” After several months of not knowing what was causing these latest symptoms and several hospital stays, she was diagnosed with encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. While she was still trying to recover from that, she had a bout with COVID-19 in 2023 that took months to get over. 

Ferrada left NIH later that year because she was so sick and she knew that working full time was taking a toll. “There [were] probably four times that I thought that I was just going to die,” she says. “So when that happens, then everything is just so different. So going from everything is perfect, I have planned the next eight years of my life, to I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow—it was very difficult to accept that.” 

Today, she turns to a combination of things that help her: medications, rest, building strength, eating healthy and meditating three times a day. “A lot of it sounds very simple, but it is not,” she says. Some days she is too tired to exercise or too busy to prepare healthy foods.

In May 2024, Ferrada started working  part time at the University of Maryland Medical System in Baltimore. She sees patients at all stages of RP and other illnesses, such as vasculitis and autoinflammatory diseases, including VEXAS.  

Being a patient has taught Ferrada a lot about compassion and has changed the way she interacts with her patients. “I have a better understanding and introspection of what goes on in your mind when you’re a patient,” she says. “It’s easier for me to talk to patients because I know what is happening.” 

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This appears in the March/April 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine