Mansi

My name is Mansi and I'm going to share my Crohn's journey with you. Due to the inflammation I was put on steroids, they gave me severe puffiness from the neck up. I was in primary school at the time and because I have always been quite skinny people asked me why I had gained so much weight in such little time. I got bullied because of this and it affected my mental health. I got anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder (also known as PTSD). I felt sad all the time and as I moved into secondary we did more Biology. One of my topics was the immune system and digestion, my teacher started talking about the small intestine, which is where my Crohn's is, and it made me think of my stressful diagnosis and the cocktail of medicines that were being given to me.

I had around 8 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy. The key idea behind CBT is that: what you think and do affects the way you feel. My therapist gave me lots of advice on how to stay calm when you think that you're going to have a panic attack such as fight or flight. Fight or flight means that you either fight the "anxiety wave" or you run away from it. When we see something daunting or think scary thoughts, our bodies prepare ourselves to take some form of action.

Although it's hard, I've found that staying positive and surrounding myself with happy people make you feel better. Some friends will help you jump over hurdles, others would give you more hurdles to jump over. Make sure that you don’t let anyone, or anything get in the way, not even your azathioprine!

Mental Health used to be quite a sore subject and not many people used to speak about it because they found it hard and felt like they would be judged. but in the last 2 years or so, celebrities have really opened up about mental health, anxiety or depression. There's one person who has opened up and has really helped me by doing that and its one of my favourite YouTubers Zoella. When she first started YouTube, Zoella didn’t speak about anxiety or mental health in any of her videos or on her blog, but in 2013 she made a video about it and it got 4.2 million views. Since then Zoë has created more videos about it and has also done a wonderful blog post. Zoella has really helped me get through some hard times. This leads me onto how meeting people has helped.

Last year I was in year seven, and I struggled to talk about Crohn's, this year I've been able to open up more and I've been able to talk about it with my friends at school. There are lots of other celebrities who have IBD and they have also spoken about mental health and how it can affect your IBD stability. Over the last 3 years, I have learnt that diet has a big impact on how my bowel feels. There are 2 things that have helped me stay in remission, the first thing is keeping a food diary. When I was first diagnosed I kept a food diary, so I could find out which foods affected me and made me ill. The second thing was a book about diet. It's called What to eat with IBD and has lots of recipes that suit people with Crohn's, colitis or inflammatory bowel disease.

Thank you very much for reading my story. I hope that I've helped some of you by raising a topic which is sometimes not spoken about.