September 2018

Hello, everyone! It’s been a while. I feel like I’m always saying that at the start of my blog posts, but this time I’m back – and it’s serious. To begin with, I now have my very own domain name, which is something I’ve been putting off for a long time while I debated whether or not I was ‘serious’ about blogging. After almost two years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I love it too much to let it fall by the wayside, so I’m determined to dedicate more time to it!

(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…

April 2018

I can’t believe April is over. We’re a full third of the way through 2018 already! It seems like only yesterday I was fretting about Christmas and now spring is here.

February 2018

February is over! I can’t believe it. I know it’s the shortest month, but really, it absolutely flew by. One of my goals for 2018 is to write more, so here’s how my February has been so far…

2.50am

This is something (almost autobiographical in nature) I wrote in the early morning, after an accident that roused me from sleep. It’s mostly about fear: an attempt to describe it for those lucky enough to not feel it follow them around like I do, and how it feels in those moments when I can’t suppress it.

The girl steps into the shower, the door sliding shut with a soft thud behind her. She blows out a breath, shaky and uncertain, and twists the first knob to unleash the torrent of water from above. The water is supposed to strip everything away: not just dirt and dust but guilt, shame, fear – all sloughing off of her body and disappearing down the drain with the water. This is where she is safe.

A Day in the Life: May 2017

Remember how I said I’d be posting for each day in Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness Week? And then remember how, immediately afterwards, I didn’t do that? Yeah, me too. I’m the worst, I admit it. Honestly, it’s taking up everything I have just to keep up with uni at the moment with exhaustion kicking in – as you’ll see by the end of this post. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a day in the life post for quite some time, but always forgot until halfway through the day – until now (or, er, Thursday, which is when this post was originally drafted). So here’s what a fairly typical day looks like for me…

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.

expectations

I am having quite a hard day.

There’s not really any single thing making it hard. I woke up at a fairly normal time, spent my customary hour in the bathroom, and then had my usual post-ablutions snooze. Yes, really, the exhaustion is so real that something as simple as emptying my bowels (wow, talk about clinical vocabulary) and taking a shower takes ALL of the energy out of me!!