Chronically Parenting

After being diagnosed with Behcet Syndrome, my mom handled the news better than anyone else probably ever could. She didn't let it effect her life and instead continued to be one of the most positive and uplifting person I've ever known.  Side effects from tablets have her kidney failure. I remember being in primary school and her being yellow in a hospital bed and just being told she was poorly. Not long after that we're sorting out a cupboard in the house and watching a VHS video of someone explaining dialysis and how to work the machine etc. As young children we would help our mom up off the floor and we would help with so much around the house to help out.  Years of steroids definitely took its toll, especially towards the end of her life. Her bones would break by just walking. She had a heart attack one year which she was given an inhaler for, one day she used her inhaler and her fifth invertebrate snapped with mere millimetres of bone protecting her central nervous sy...

So this week is mental health awareness week - so I thought I'd share my journey: I started suffering the age of sixteen. I started showing symptoms of crohns disease from the age of four; but I wasn't diagnosed until almost eighteen. I was in a room with a gastroenterologist consultant who said I was lying for attention. I was lay naked whilst she checked my body for signs of self harm and asking me questions like 'do you starve yourself to look good?', 'do you get the least amount of attention in your house?', 'have you ever been sexually abused', the list went on. I was crying and begging her to believe there was something wrong with me and I'm not an attention seeker. She agreed to one final colonoscopy as long as I agreed to see a psychiatrist 'when it comes back clear'. As strange as it may seem - being diagnosed the day of that colonoscopy (which was performed by a different consultant) was one of the happiest moments of my life. It ...

For a while now that's what I've heard - 'I don't know how you do it' Truth is: I don't know myself. I started a new job in February, I work around 25 hours a week and I do love it. I've gone from housebound, scared to leave the house, no friends close by, no adult conversation and just feeling all round lonely and like my son deserves better. Throughout working hard I've been having tests done at Bristol. These are just the conditions wrong with my bowel: Colonic inertia Bile salt malabsorption Crohns disease Hypersensitive rectum I've prolapsed twice whilst working. Twice my intestines have decided to pop out and say hi! I've drove myself to the hospital, had gas and air to have it put back in, and returned to work the day after. I'm exhausted, I'm sore, I'm at the end of my tether of this happening. But at the same time I'm proud. Proud of pushing through, proud of not giving up, and proud for not falling apart. Only...