Hi everyone! I am a 19 year who was diagnosed with CD almost 11 years
ago when I was 8 years old. The doctors suspected that I had it
starting when I was 5 but they all said that I was too young to have
it even though I had the symptoms for it. It all started with really
bad stomach aches and me not acting like a normal 5 year old would.
The doctors went in when I was 5 and took out my appendix and some
swollen lymphnodes (because that's what they thought was wrong), but
I still had stomach pains and was in and out of the hospitals. It
went that way for a couple of years and then one year when I was 8 I
got really sick. I was in the hospital in Yankton, South Dakota
(where I lived at the time) and had to be taken down to the
Children's Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. When I was there they did a
colonoscopy, but the thing that was different with this one and the
ones that I had had previously was that I didn't bounce back like I
normally did. Instead I became really sick and had to stay in the
hospital. My stomach started hurting really badly and was starting to
destend, but the doctor that I had at the time said that I was fine.
The pain had been getting so terrible that I was getting morphine and
the pain was still not going away. At one point they came in to draw
blood and they tried getting it out of my arms but were getting
nothing, so they ended up having to draw the blood from my groin. I
had been in the hospital for awhile and my family had to go back to
Yankton because my parents had to go back to work, so I was left down
in Omaha by myself. I mean I still had family down there, but when
your only 8 years old and don't feel well at all you just want your
mommy by your side. By that time my stomach had gotten so big that
everyone in my family said that I looked like a pregnant 8 year old.
Eventually a different doctor came in and took one look at me and
said we need to get her into surgery as soon as possible (which was
the next day). My parents were reached and they sped the whole way
from Yankton to Omaha (from one to the other it's about a 2 and a
half hour drive). Well I later found out that the reason that my
stomach kept getting bigger was because I was bleeding internally,
they also had to remove 3 feet of dead small intestine. Also during
the surgery there had been a point where I had stopped breathing. My
parents told me that when the doctor came out and told them
everything he said if they would of waited til later in the day I
would have bled to death! But I bounced back from that and I still
have my good times and bad. Right is one of my bad times, within the
past year I've been in the hospital more time then I can count, but
I'm hoping that soon will be one of my good streaks!!