She Almost Lost Everything to HS. Now She Is Just Getting Started

PreShus was going through puberty when hidradenitis suppurativa entered her life before she had the language for it, before there was much of a community around it, and before she understood that she had not caused it herself.

“I honestly thought that I caused it myself,” she says. “I thought I put on too much deodorant. As a kid, you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m doing this to myself.”

That early confusion set the tone for years of navigating a condition that is as invisible to others as it is consuming for those living with it. Twenty-six years ago, the community and education resources that exist today simply did not. PreShus was on her own to figure out what HS was, what it could do and how to live alongside it — all while growing up.

When College Became a Crisis

The weight of that burden became most visible during her freshman year at Hampton University, an HBCU she had dreamed of attending and arrived at with her family’s enormous pride behind her. What followed was one of the hardest periods of her life. Away from her mother, who had essentially served as her home nurse, PreShus was suddenly managing her condition alone while navigating the heat of campus life, long walks across a sprawling campus, anxiety, depression, social isolation and the creeping shame of a condition she could not fully explain to anyone around her.

Skipping class became survival. The calls home started. The GPA slipped. And eventually, an academic dismissal letter arrived.

Rather than giving up, PreShus wrote a letter, an honest one, to the admissions department at what is now St. Peter’s University in New Jersey. Someone read it, understood and gave her a chance. She changed her major to communications and media studies, overloaded her schedule, finished her degree and met her husband along the way.

The Lesson She Carries Forward

Now approaching 40 and building a filmmaking career as part of a Hollywood writers cohort, PreShus speaks with a clarity that only comes from having fought for every inch of the life you wanted.

“I have HS, but HS doesn’t have me,” she says. “I’m growing with it, and I’m learning with it, and I’m learning to live with it — while not letting it take over my life, and the path that I have for my life.”

Her message to students with HS navigating college today is the same one she wishes someone had handed her at 18: You are a whole person, you are seen, your dreams are still yours, and you are just getting started.

It is a message that carries particular weight, given what she knows about the financial reality of managing HS in college. She remembers her mother selling a car just to cover an admissions fee. She remembers the impossible math of being a sick student: figuring out how to afford bandages, get to doctor’s appointments and have what she needed to function, all while trying to keep up academically. That is why she is now lending her voice to raise awareness about UCB’s HS Scholarship Program, an initiative designed to ease exactly that burden for students living with the condition today.

“This scholarship would have been a game changer when I was in school,” she says. “It opens up so many doors and gives so much opportunity to people to actually live what can feel like a normal life.”

For PreShus, supporting that program is both personal and purposeful. The admissions counselor at St. Peter’s who took a chance on her and believed in her story lit a fire that she has carried ever since. Helping make that kind of opportunity more accessible for the next generation of students with HS is her way of paying it forward.