Leidy Ardila is 35 years old, and for half her life, her body has been doing something no medicine has managed to stop.
She has fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), an extremely rare genetic disease in which muscles and other soft tissues can gradually turn into bone. There is no cure. When bone formation affects movement, or even breathing, each day demands more of her.
But Leidy doesn’t tell her story in terms of what she has lost. In 2023, she sat beside her mother on RCN’s Hablando claro program and said something that really hits home: for her, turning another year older is an achievement, because it means she kept fighting. She also admitted that she often keeps her symptoms to herself so as not to worry the woman who has been by her side from the very beginning.
Today, she shares her day-to-day life on social media without hiding. And when she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t see a diagnosis: “I see a fighter”.