Holding onto the side of my chair in a meeting, looking onto my young student’s stoma as his mother explained the procedure of changing the colostomy bag… I remember finding it difficult to look, but doing my best to appear professional. I sat and took notes during an Early Intervention, Department of Education and Training meeting.
Little did I know that I would be facing a similar future just a little later in my life.
At age 30, just after becoming a first-time mum, I began to spend a lot of time in the toilet. Actually, too much time. Juggling motherhood and toilet visits became the story of my life. I knew something was wrong when I began to see blood, however I simply thought a short-term treatment of oral medication would fix it.
1 in 10 Australian women suffer from this crippling condition. Mel Grieg is one of them.
After further medical investigation, my diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis was confirmed – a chronic and typically incurable form of inflammatory bowel disease, which began to have an enormous impact on my life, more than I ever could’ve imagined.
I felt it all: abdominal pain, frequent bloody stools, and high sense of urgency at the most inopportune times, cramps, weight loss and fatigue. Because flare-ups can be triggered by food, at times I would starve myself to control the condition. Even a slice of cake on my birthday was out of the question.
The condition was unpredictable and uncontrollable, so much that I would need to measure distances and time to get to a toilet if I was out of the house. Going out in public was like a precise military action, having to scope out where the nearest public toilet was located and how quickly I could get there if I needed to. As a busy mother of two and a part-time teacher, I often wondered how I must have looked at times when I had to leave my kids in a parking lot with a toy to distract them as I desperately ran to find a toilet.
