Much more than sadness.

I have so many problems and things wrong with me it’s hard to keep track. I know that this site is for things to do with depression, anxiety, suicide or similar things, but this one is more about other things I struggle with and could maybe find others who can talk to me about it.

So basically it all started that I was born 6 weeks early, a tiny underweight baby who “died” and got resuscitated or whatever 3 times. I mean, bad start right? Well, since then I was sick in hospital for a few months and then still sick after that, just in my own home though. When I was a baby, I had terrible eczema where my whole body would just be red and bleeding because I would scratch myself. When I was about 2, I finally gotten rid of the eczema but unfortunately then found out I have asthma. I still have asthma now and I would say that compared to other asthmatics, I have it quite bad. So yeah then I was in hospital every now and then because of asthma attacks too. When I was almost 3, my doctors had told my mum that I have allergies and that I should be testing all the new foods I eat. So I found out I was allergic to sugar, wheat, dairy, red fruits and vegetables, nuts, eggs and god knows what else. When I was about 3, mum testing me with a peanut to see if I was allergic. I didn’t even put it in my mouth, let alone actually eat the peanut, before my whole face puffed up and the ambulance rushed me to hospital. Some people don’t know what their first memory is, like the earliest memory. But I do. It was at the hospital. I had gone into anaphylactic shock which is “an extreme, often life-threatening allergic reaction to an antigen to which the body has become hypersensitive”. So yeah, I had to spend the night in hospital and my first memory was that night, when after I was “all better”, I got given a zooper-dooper (I’m Australian and they’re called something else in America but you know those icy-poles where you have to cut open the plastic at the top) and that’s my first memory. In the hospital. After getting terrible news that changed my life literally forever. Eating an icy-pole.

Aaaaaaanyway, getting side-tracked! So after *that* happened, I was made to carry around an epipen for the rest of my life, as well as my ventolin for my asthma. Nothing really bad happened as I got older, the list of my allergies had shrunk and I don’ think there were too many hospital visits. When I was 8, around 2 weeks before my birthday, I went in for my annual allergy test and found out I had become allergic to wheat and dairy again. So by this time I was only allergic to those and eggs, nuts and some other random non-important things like pineapple, tomatoes and asparagus. I was also allergic to bees, wasps, bull-ants, cats, dogs, rabbits, donkeys and horses. So on my birthday I ate my favourite wheat and dairy foods knowing that I could be going off them for a while.

Nothing really changed up until I was about 10, when I started doing gymnastics. I did gymnastics for 5 years, competing and placing in every one of my competitions. But in this time I broke my wrist falling off beam, then fractured something around my ankle missing a jump to the bar. Here we go again with the hospitals… In this time also, I dropped my epipen and my mum always used to pick it up and check if it had gone off when she dropped it, so thats what I did. But, I didn’t know how the epipen worked when I was like 10 I guess, and so long story short I accidentally took off the safety cap and shop the needle through my thumb. Literally. Like it went through my skin, nail and bone. And so I ran screaming to mu, with an epipen out the bottom of my thumb and the needle out the top. Sooner or late, the ambulance came and put me on the green whistle and took it out. Fun times am I right?

Well yeahhhhh. So a couple years ago my allergies were going great, I think I was down to just nuts and eggs. But then about a year ago I become allergic to dairy again which wasn’t that bad but still. THENNNN, I got freaking diagnosed with Coeliac disease. Yep, allergic to all gluten and this time it was forever. I’m a little bit used to the whole gluten free thing now but it sucks. A couple months ago I had my allergy test and good news, I’m back on dairy again. But bad news, I had somehow because a really really extremely high amount of allergic to peanuts. Like if it was a grading system of how allergic you are to something, I would have been A+++.

I know this was literally such a rant about my life and problems unrelated to the depressing stuff I usually post about but yeah I hope some of you have made it to here and feel free to comment. Because, although I might have just used 800 words to complain to you about my health problems in life, I now have knowledge and the topic and am currently accelerating a year to do VCE in Health and become a Dietitian and help other people with allergies and other dietary needs in the future. I might a have lot more problems than just sadness, but I’ve still got dreams for the future and I know other people are having a tough time too.

UPDATE: So it’s now Friday. I’ve been home from school since Tuesday and will most likely go back next Tuesday or Wednesday. Usually I would work Friday, Sunday and Tuesdays but I’ve had to take them off. So what happened is on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, around 1:00 am I woke up with asthma and so I went to go have my ventolin but it was empty. I didn’t have a spare at the time so I tried to just calm myself down and try to relax and breathe. It didn’t work and so about 1:30 I went and woke up my mu to see what I need to do. Mum tried other things to help my breathing but it was really bad and nothing she did was helping either. So around 2:00 she rang an “on call doctor” and they were booked up overnight and told mum to take me to emergency at the hospital. Although there were other people in emergency, I got through before them all because it really was an emergency. I got rushed to a respiratory room or something like that and before I knew it they were giving me all kinds of drugs and inhalers. I was connected to like 5 different machines and my heart was literally up to 140 bpm when its supposed to be like 60-90 bpm. It was horrible, it’s literally that worst asthma that I’ve ever had that I remember, like it was bad asthma attack. Well since then ive been put on like 4 different drugs and it makes me all shaky and pale and weak and it sucks because the last 2 nights my asthma is slightly worse but luckily still no way near as bad Tuesday night.