Let the Sick Shit begin!

I have been thinking about starting to blog some of my rants/whines/reflections/thoughts lately but now that I am here typing something I don’t know what to say.

 I have had a vague post about ‘Hope’ stewing but seems weird to have as a first post…Then there are whole essays in my head about other people and living with chronic illness (and ho in general they don’t ‘get it’).  Maybe a background post would be more appropriate?

 I started to get very sick when I was around 11 or 12, before that I was your typical ADHD kid with way too much energy to contain. I think it was a virus around the time I was involved in a youth theatre production “King Jack” and I had pushed myself to continue going to rehearsals despite not really recovering. The year after that was my first year of high school which i would rather pretend never happened. I won’t go into details here but at least once event triggered PTSD which still has some impacts on me today.

 The trauma of many events that year probably didn’t help much and I started to become very sick. After moving high school and going up a grade (which helped socially for about a year), it was hard with recovery from the year before but also it was more than that. Fatigue and joint pain none of my doctors could really explain. My periods (which started at 11yo and were pretty regular from the get go) suddenly started to become very painful. GP put me on the pill to help try ease the pain and sent us to see a specialist on suspicion of endomitriosis. She just said i didn’t know how to use tampons properly and was very dismissive and condescending about my age etc. Jokes on her but more of that a few years later ;)


 In year 10 I started to attend school part time, which put me behind in a lot of areas and with people, but thanks to some awesomely understanding teachers i managed to graduate. That year I also started to use a walking stick regularly just to help out with getting around. Some of the jerky year 9 kids used to steel it now and then, and there wasn’t much I could do about it :P


 Around the end of year 10 I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes when they found sugar in a urine test for something else….this was a shock to the system but I studiously started to do my regular blood tests, and eating a Low GI diet. The doctors were confused about it still, by all rights I shouldn’t have had T2 as I wasn’t overweight or elderly etc etc. But that all gets explained later.


 Approaching college we knew I would need to go part time and it would probably be a three year thing instead of two years. It was hard, but I had such an awesome IT teacher that helped me get through, and find my absolute passion for computing. Beforehand I had been planning on going to the school of art but after college I wanted to learn how to programme. During the first year of college my blood sugars sky rocketed and wouldn't stay down and I was diagnoses with type 1 diabetes around my 16th birthday. I was on insulin pen for a while then went to pump and have had many adventured with pumps and pens since. Now currently on a medtronic and loving it. While at college I managed to contract TB from someone who came to school with active TB! Luckily it never became active but because of my health issues they were keen to put me on a course of medications to severely lessen the likelihood of it ever becoming active. Those drugs were pretty heavy and made me very sick for a good 6 - 8 months. I will now always test positive for TB with the skin prick test…blah!

//EDIT// some where here, I think it was in my 2nd year of college, I had the lovely experence of having pancreatitus and spending 5 nights in hospital. No one really wanted to say what they thought it was but reading up about lupus now there is prenatally a link between lupus and pancreatitus. Why didn't i get a Dx then? Who knows! //

 I went on to study an advanced diploma of professional games development in programming at AIE (academy of interactive entertainment) which took two years. First year was tricky but fun! I even got to move out with my teacher for a while which was even more fun. I was nominated for a Matthew marsh award at the end of the year which is an award for people struggling with illness but still kicking butt at studying at AIE. To my huge surprise I actually got awarded it! First programmer to get it I believe and there is a plaque and everything <3


 Second year started out well, but an operation to finally removed endomitriosis (which they did manage to find some and remove) early in the year seemed to have triggered massive illness. Looking back i know what it did was trigger a Lupus flareup and it put me seriously out of the game for the rest of the year. It’s amazing i didn’t drop out between the sickness and the bullieing i started to get from fellow classmates. But i graduated and i have the paper to prove it which makes me proud :)

 So I graduated last year at the time of writing this in 2012. The plan was to go back to AIE this year to study the 3D modelling side of the Avd. Dip. But it quickly became clear i was not up to it. I had to move back home with my family because I was not doing well mentally or physically. Most of thus year i have spend working on my head space, and pushing for a diagnosis of my Lupus which i finally got about 6 months ago. I have not been well enough to study, or work part time. And it’s not looking good for next year either.

 I’ll write more about recent crap in later posts but this is a short bio/medical history/intro i guess. It probably covers enough ;)

Sorry about terrible grammar, spelling, or structure…I am in no way a good writer, but feel this would be a good thing for me to do :)

 If anyone read this whole thing they get +50 points! </ br>