How did we get here?
So, here we are, my first blog post!
It kind of feels surreal that I am writing my first blog post given that not six months ago I couldn’t even lift my mobile phone while barely awake in an intensive care unit, but now I am sat at home with a laptop on my lap (ha, fancy that!) ready to tell this gigantic story of how I got here and what happened to me. There were plenty of times over the past seven months that I truly thought I’d never get to this level of ability again and to be typing this right now feels pretty wild. As much as I am creating this blog to help others, because that is my main goal from this, I am also doing it for me. I have been through unimaginable trauma the past seven months, and I feel this is the best way to make sense of everything so far. So, you the reader and me, are definitely strapped in for this journey together.
Here goes, I guess…
From childhood I have always had a dodgy tummy, as a kid it was always put down to eating too much sugar or processed crap and it was never serious enough to seek medical advice for – it was just one of those things, I was a girl with a sensitive stomach (aren’t we all?). Needing to use the loo quite frequently in secondary school definitely triggered a lot of anxiety for me because all girls’ schools could be quite mean places and the teachers didn’t really like letting us out of lesson to go to the toilet, which I hope is a thing of the past now because what kind of messed up behaviour is that?! We all gotta go! This led to me complaining of being ill a lot and going home where I felt much safer to use the toilet.
However, it wasn’t until my family and I went through a particularly stressful time when I was 16 and 17 years old that my stomach problems decided to kick it up a notch. My mam received a kidney transplant that was donated by my brother in 2012 and once my things were stable again, I felt my stomach decided it was it’s turn for some attention. It’s interesting because there is a lot of research that suggests emotional turmoil and stress can have a physical effect on our bodies, especially when it comes to inflammation and our immune system (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5137920/) and I am pretty sure this particularly stressful part of my life was what awoke a (somewhat) dormant autoimmune disease in me – Crohn’s Disease.
There are going to be specific posts dedicated to the early symptoms I experienced and how best to advocate for yourself and a diagnosis, so for this post I will be brief. It took me two years to finally receive a Crohn’s Diagnosis from when I first visited the GP about my stomach issues, they initially tried to palm me off with IBS or constipation and let me tell you… Prescribing laxatives to someone with undiagnosed Crohn’s Disease is a big no-no and can be very dangerous. It later landed me in hospital for a few days. After an initial private consultation with a Gastroenterologist and numerous MRI’s, stool samples and colonoscopies (completed under the NHS), I finally received my Crohn’s Diagnosis in 2014.
It's a strange feeling, being told you have a chronic illness after fighting for so long to understand what was wrong with you. On the one hand, I was so incredibly grateful that what I was dealing with wasn’t cancer because, as quite a lot of us do, we first go to Dr Google who likes to tell us the worst-case scenario. On the other hand, I now had to deal with the knowledge that actually, I have a lifelong disease that isn’t curable and is something I am going to have to live with – there was a flurry of emotions in my brain, and I couldn’t decide which one to cling onto as a result of this revelation regarding my health. At the time, I was someone that used to get herself incredibly worked up just for blood tests so I was relieved to hear that my treatment to begin with was Mesalazine sachets and not something scary like injections or infusions and for a good year I took these sachets as I truly believed they were helping me… Until they didn’t. It was then I moved onto Azathioprine and then summer of last year I was prescribed Adalimumab injections, (as mentioned, these treatments are something I will go into depth on in other posts to give you as much insight as possible).
Adalimumab is where I believe my Crohn’s Disease really took a turn and where all of this kicked off…
