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  • Writer's pictureKayo's Korner

Where did it all begin?

Updated: Apr 29, 2019

In 2017 I was enjoying Christmas at my cousin's house. Christmas day has been cosy and fun in their humble home huddled together in the living room watching movies, eating festive foods, jollof rice and laughing together. Although the flat was small, they always made sure that I was made sure that I was absorbed into their family and fun. With them, wherever they may may be, I am at home. All was well until boxing day. I woke at 6am said goodbye to my brother in law Paul as he left for work. Less than 2 hours later I was hunched around the downstairs toilet in excruciating pain, unable to stop vomiting.


The condition lasted all day despite taking Gaviscon as prescribed by the paramedic who responded to our 111 call. The pain in my top left gut under my ribcage was worsening. Nothing would stay down. No amount of water, mint teal, essential oil solutions or dioralyte could calm this attack. It wouldn't stop. Later that evening, my cousin took me to Royal London Hospital and I was soon admitted into an isolated ward. I spent the next 7 days and nights there in agony, producing endless bowls of thick black liquid.


2 years later almost to the date on January 20th a sudden searing pain gripped my upper left bowel. I had not been drinking alcohol or rich foods. This illness took me by surprise! As I clasped the toilet, feeling delirious in my agony I knew this to be true...the monster had come back!



I would spend a full week at home in this condition. 3 times turned away from Accident & Emergency after being given morphine and anti-sickness to stop the symptoms. The third time in A&E I was told to stay at home and "just vomit". By the end of the week a team of 4 paramedics came to my home. I was so ill I couldn't make it to the door to let them in. I crawled and stayed on the floor. They arrived with their great team buzz and energy picked me up off the floor and lay me on the living room sofa. Some hours later, being unable to stabilise me, they got me admitted straight to the resuscitation unit. Despite attaching me to their special black boxes with big curly wires, despite filling me with 2 plump bags of electrolytes, when they stood me up my blood pressure went crashing through the floor as if there was a vortex down there sucking it out of me.


At the time in resuscitation, I didn't know why I was in this strange looking ward with big white machines, pads stuck all over me, machines bleeping with trance-like clinical persistence. I was swimming between pain and fuzziness. A man in a white coat came to my bedside asking if I'd had any operations to my abdomen in the last years. I told him that I'd had troublesome fibroids taken out in 2016. He looked at me sternly and let me know that my illness might require surgery.


"SURGERY?! WHY!?" I gasped. Suddenly, in a flash my mind was momentarily alert. "We're unable to be certain about anything" replied the medic as he left my side.


I slipped back into my blur of morphine dulled pain as they transferred me to a what felt like a 'holding ward', the "Clinical Decision Unit".


That night I got no rest for pain. Using the walls to support me I went to the nurses perhaps 8 or 9 times asking for pain relief until they had no more medicine to give me. It was a restful night for no one, yet when the duty doctor arrived in the morning he explained his aims...


"We're going to discharge you."


Nobody wants to stay in hospital but I had a strong gut feeling. Apart from the pain there now sheltered utter disbelief. Clasping the top left of my gut, weak yet unmovable I sternly uttered the only words that I could


"I am NOT leaving this hospital without a definitive test!".

Little did I know it then, I would not be leaving that hospital for the next 5 weeks.


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