IBD and Me

My name is Graham and I'm a 55 year old Scotsman. This gives me the inarguable birthright to use explosively colourful language.

This is my story with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (Ulcerative Colitis).

I've have just turned 20 years old, I'm studying for an MA in English and Philosophy at Dundee University. My second year is nearly at an end, and all I've really got to look forward to is some end of term parties with my new best friends. Except, my previously hard earned reputation as the hard drinking, life and soul is getting tarnished. I'm missing all the nights out. The hangovers and indiscretions I would have inevitably racked up are evaporating before my eyes. I'm getting home from class and falling asleep, frequently without eating, and not waking up til the next morning. No matter how much sleep I'm getting, I feel less and less well. Something is not right. But being a young male with too much testosterone, I ignore it.

Term ends and I go home to visit my parents back in the rural backwaters of the highlands. By now I've made a few visits to my GP. He thinks that as a young and at the time, fitness fanatic that there is nothing to worry about. No matter how vividly I try to describe the excruciating pain that I am now in (my insides literally feel like they have been replaced with barbed wire), nothing seems to dissuade him from the notion that it will pass in a few days. He is the doctor, so I believe him.

On my coach journey back to Dundee, in pain that I find unbearable I have my first "accident". I soil myself on a bus. As a 20 year old. The humiliation was absolute, but worse was to come when I go to the tiny bus toilet and discover that the mess looks more like blood than I was expecting. Pure blood! This is only the start.

I'm in my student flat alone, and being the 80's we didn't even a landline never mind a, barely invented yet, mobile phone. My GP is still fobbing me off with "food poisoning" and other fanciful diagnosis. Yet the trips to the bathroom are now counting up to 40 plus times a day - all look like i'm shitting nothing but blood! The pain is unfathomable - I find it impossible to stand, sit or lie down without being in agony. It doesn't matter, as every few minutes I have to dash to the toilet anyway. I find it impossible to eat or even drink a glass of water without my stomach cramping and a painful dash to the loo resulting. After a couple of weeks of this I have become too weak to leave the flat, I have barely eaten for so long that I can hardly remember the last thing I ate and kept down. We have no phone. I'm alone. All my Uni friends are on holiday. I have no way of getting in touch with anybody and nobody has anyway of getting in touch with me! My parents have never even been in Dundee before, let alone visited me. I realize I'm fucked.

A few more days of this, symptoms worsening by the day I try to go to bed, and for the first time in weeks I feel absolute Zen like serenity! Perfect absolute peace! Then it gets weird!

(**I am not a religious or spiritual person at all**. Still not)

I get into bed that evening in my third floor flat, convinced as I've ever been about anything that I'm going to die! It feels amazing, like nothing I've ever felt before or since! Total joy, the pain is going to be over! And yet after a few minutes I hear a knocking at my window (three floors up) and I manage to crawl over to see what it is and I see three faces, (I don't recognize any of them) telling me I'm going to be OK. I try to rationalize it as being hallucinations brought on by blood loss, wrong meds etc. But it keeps happening, and the flat buzzer/intercom keeps going off and when I answer it, I get the same message - that I'm going to be OK. Then about 5am in the morning the buzzer/intercom goes off again and when I answer it - it's my parents! My mother had awoken in the middle of the night with a feeling that she had to see her only son. RIGHT FUCKING NOW! She woke my father up and told him they were driving the three and a half hour journey to Dundee there and then. Luckily they had my address, so upon arrival they pulled into the Riverside branch of Tesco and persuaded a taxi driver to guide them to my flat. My Mum says that I had lost so much weight and blood that I looked like a skeleton when I opened the door. They just picked me up, literally, and took me to the hospital. Within hours I had my diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis. The gastroenterologist who treated me came and sat on my bed and informed me that "another day, and I wouldn't have made it". All I could reply, after the previous night, was "I know".

I spent that summer holiday in the hospital undergoing various treatments and being fed through a tube. Every night I hoped I wouldn't wake up in the morning.

Slowly but surely the symptoms began to improve and even regained enough weight to be sent home to be in the care of parents.

It's been a long hard journey, one of many adversities I've battled, and if not won, come out with a respectable draw.

Today I'm thankful that I did wake up every day, when at the time it felt the cruelest option. I'm on my second career, one that I find rewarding, surrounded by colleagues who are supportive and understanding. More importantly, I'm in a relationship with a beautiful woman who has made my life complete, Ulcerative Colitis or not.