Sunday, March 23, 2014

Part 1 of the story

Hello again,

So to continue from where i left off in my previous post here is my story, or part of it at least.

As I mentioned before I was diagnosed with Asthma as a child but I don't really remember much of it from my early childhood. Just doctors appointments and medications that I had to take. Some of them made me swell up and I started putting on weight (I think it was just water weight from the steroids).

I'll leave that out for now and talk about my IBS/Acid Reflux experiences.

Back in school I remember getting stomach aches whenever exam time rolled around and I would find myself running to the bathroom (Told you its not pretty) in the morning before taking my exams. I never really knew why and my mother/people would tell me that its just nerves. I would occasionally get dizzy, faint and throw up on the first day of going back to school or starting a new school/new grade. I specifically remember my 4th grade experience and 7th grade experience. The dizziness would come out of the blue randomly and the world would go black and I'd slip to the floor and start throwing up.

Now I don't know how much of that is relevant to my IBS or Acid Reflux but for some reason I feel like they were early warning signs of what was to come.

Anyways, I grew up and managed to graduate high school in one piece without any major episodes. That summer I was supposed to pack my bags and study abroad in the UK. I was excited and nervous about it at the same time. That's when things started to get bad.

Every night I would stay up (It was summer vacation after all) and eat my favorite snack (Which is salted popcorn) and watch tv and from then on I started to have stomach pains and more trips to the bathroom (Painful ones too)(Note: bad sleeping patterns can and will worsen IBS symptoms)

My mother took me to a clinic and the doctor then told me that it was just nerves (Again) and that I was feeling this way because I was going away and leaving my family behind, etc etc.

I believed the doctor and went back home but the episodes continued and I started getting scared. Was this new thing that was happening to me and causing me pain stop? Would it get worse? Would it effect my new life at University? So many questions were left unanswered and with each passing day I was more and more afraid of being on my own in a foreign country.

So I decided regretfully that I would stay and not go abroad out of fear. Fear of my strange sickness. To this day I regret passing up that opportunity but my situation at the time at the tender age of 18 scared me too much.

About a year passed and nothing major happened. The pain stopped. The episodes stopped. My life went back to normal.

Then a few months before my 19th birthday it happened again..


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