lauralily

I ended up giving the rugby player thing a miss today which I know I will regret later on this week but I'm just having one of those days where everything from the last year has come back round and landed on top of me again.

I don't think I have depression as most of the time I feel in control but today I'm having a hate my body day which I haven't had for a long while, at least not one as bad as this but were in plentiful supply over the summer.

Perhaps I should explain a little more so you can follow. This time last year I was a UK size 10-12 and weighed little more than 9 stone, it was the smallest I've ever been and I hadn't thought or worried about looks since I was at school. I still had eye problems back then but no-one realy knew what they were or how to treat them, all I was told was that they were being caused by a fault in my immune system, as a result I decided to start eating plenty of foods rich in zinc and vitamin C.

By christmas 2004 my local hospital were at a loss as to how to treat me as I hadn't responded to any of the eye drops they'd given me or any of the injections I'd had in my bottom eye-lid so they referred me to Bristol hospital which specialises in eye conditions. It was on my first appointment there I was told of the severity of what I had. Firstly the immune system problem was not an underactive what - exactly the opposite, my immune system was over-active and I'd been adding fuel to the fire by consuming all that zinc, as a result my body was rejecting it's own organs, normally this sort of thing only happens after a transplant which I've never had. So that is what was up with my eye, I was rejecting it without even knowing it and if I didn't begin treatment soon I would go blind and it could also spread to the other eye.

Around the same time a young consultant at the hospital was looking for people with my condition for a trial as he had devised a new treatment scheme for people with it. 'Why not?' I thought, I knew damn well that I would want someone to help me if they had the chance so it only felt right that I could be helping someone else a few years down the line. How naive was I?

I was stuck on a stupidly high dose of steroid, first came the erratic mood swings, next came the weight gain. I out on 4.5 stone in 6 months, I looked bad and I knew it but by winter 2005 it was the way the weight was causing me more health problems which bothered me more so against the advice of doctors I stopped taking them.

Since I stopped I've only managed to lose about half a stone, its so hard, it doesn't matter what diet, or how much excerise I do it has little effect on me as the chemicals haven't left my system yet and it makes me feel so shitty. I can't believe how ignorant I was, I used to take my body for granted so much and now the smallest things can be so challenging.

To top it off the week before christmas I found out I was infertile. I never was before I was on steroids. I want answers.

So if you read all of that, you're probably thinking 'my god she likes to talk about herself a lot' but sometimes it helps when I write these things down as it vents a lot of my anger.

The story ends with me being on a huge dose of immunosuppressants to stop my immune systme rejecting anymore organs, they're not so bad now. Weight is such a relative thing compared to the rest of it but I'm 21 years old and vain as it sounds I should look better now than any other time in my life but instead I'm a bloated, be-strechmarked moon face. How attractive.