By the beginning of October, about two weeks after the start of my symptoms, I was already down over 10 pounds. I couldn’t eat enough to maintain my weight, or to fuel my body through school and the senior events that I was supposed to be enjoying. I spent all of the energy I had on schoolwork, and on pretending I was healthy. I told no one except my family about my rapidly declining condition. At school, I would smile through the pain and exhaustion I was experiencing and attempt to eat a few bites at lunch to cover up the fact that I was the sickest I had ever been.
I went back to see my GI doctor and after hearing about my worsening symptoms, he too became concerned and ordered a CT scan of my abdomen, to see if there was any visible structural abnormality that could be making me sick. I secretly hoped that the scan would show something abnormal that could be easily fixed. But just as my previous tests, the CT came back completely normal. Once again, I was defeated and frustrated that everything looked healthy while I was suffering so much.
Over the next three weeks, I continued to lose weight, get weaker, and feel worse. That is when my doctor, my family, and I made the difficult decision to opt for an exploratory laparoscopy. My surgeon would go in through small holes in my abdomen with cameras and tools to see if he could find the cause of the pain.
This is when I finally told my friends that I had been sick. It was a relief to be able to share a part of my life that had been controlling so much. So, on October 27, 2021, I went in for my exploratory surgery in hopes of finally getting to the root cause of my pain.
As soon as I woke up from surgery, I asked my parents if they had found anything, and much to my surprise, they said yes. My surgeon had found and removed five adhesions, a type of scar tissue, on my intestines and liver, from inflammation and my previous surgeries. I was ecstatic as this procedure had the ability to cure my symptoms. Over the next week, I began to eat again. Small bites at first, but still more than I had eaten in a month. I was sure that the surgery had worked, and all of my remaining discomfort was from the procedure. However, as I weaned off of the pain medication that I was given for the surgery, it became clear that unfortunately, the adhesions had not been the cause of my pain. We needed to continue the journey of searching for answers.
Kate's Courage 