Happy birthday to me! If you follow me on Instagram (or Twitter), you’ll have seen that I’m currently in hospital. What a way to spend your 21st birthday, eh? Shackled to an IV pole in the hospital.
Another Orbit
Category: crohn’s disease
On Losing Hope
This is probably the darkest – and most honest – post I’ve written in a while. Content warning for depression and mention of death, and my apologies in advance for the florid turns of phrase I use to describe abstract concepts.
I’ve been quiet lately. Christmas came and went – I had a beautiful, rejuvenating few weeks with my family, and I was brimming with hope and optimism for infliximab and the new year ahead. January came. And, as always, exams came with it. I returned to uni, shut myself away in my flat, and studied harder than I’d ever studied before. I was exhausted. But it paid off.
And now February is here. The new term has started, the modules I was so excited about are up and running, and… it’s not living up to my personal hype. In short, I’m struggling. Really struggling.
Gastroenterology Appointment: September 2018
Okay, so, here’s the tale from my updates post that I started to write, before realising it was waaaaay too long and it would need its own post. I always think “oh, nothing much happened,” and then I start writing and actually A LOT HAPPENED. But, spoiler: we’re still no further forward than we were six months ago. How can that be, I hear you ask? Well, let me start from the beginning..,
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(My) Mental Health and IBD
It’s World IBD Day! It’s Mental Health Awareness Week! I hope both of them are good to you. It’s quite an intersection of ‘awareness days’, isn’t it, considering the mental toll IBD exacts? So there’s no better time to write about when the two collide spectacularly! Here’s my tale…
Diagnosis
It’s the first day of Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness Week – happy #PurpleFriday to you all, and I hope you’re doing well – or if you’re not, that you’re doing as well as you can be right now. I’m hoping to publish one post per day for the entirety of this week. We’ll see how it goes – but to kick-start the process, I thought I’d make it a long one, and share something I’ve never written about in full before: my diagnosis story.
Humira Update: 10 weeks in!
It’s Friday! Like every Friday, I’m in a better mood than I have been all week. Today, though, there was an extra spring in my step, because (just like I have every fortnight for the last 10 weeks) I had my Humira shot. And it dawned on me that I’ve gone so long without writing a real blog post – so why not update you on how it’s going so far?
recover
Hi, my name’s Emma, and I’m kind of a hypocrite. No, wait. Scratch that. Definitely a hypocrite.
I’ve not been having a very good week so far. Monday night saw me eating some Co-Op chunky chips for dinner, and Tuesday morning caught me totally off guard by presenting me with… a partial bowel obstruction. From chips. So I spent the day utterly useless, on my bed, writhing in pain, and tearful because – of course! – the one item I’d forgotten to bring back to university was a hot water bottle, that is, the only item that could have helped me.
