Erin Bradley

Update ?

Hope everyone is well. Thank you for all the support and love it truly means more than words can explain. As some may know I was tube fed by an NJ tube that bypassed my stomach just under a week ago I got the all clear from my specialist to pull it out as I’m now fully eating my intake orally. This is after 17 months of not being able to eat anything without severe effects and relying completely on my tube. We are just over 40km into the live fearless challenge with heaps more to do. Let’s keep it going strong ??

My story

Hi my name is Erin, I’m 16 years old and have Crohn’s disease. For years I have been sick and looking back on my life now never fully ‘normal’ for ages. When I was 10 we began looking into it I was gluten intolerant this is when I first spoke up about my symptoms. I’m not a diagnosed coeliac but I’m treated as one now. Then I became deficient in iron, it wasn’t really thought much of at the time but I had my first iron infusion. I always thought that everyone lived with these ‘normal’ symptoms until I became extremely sick and knew there was something wrong, but then being a teenage girl walking into a hospital it was instantly ‘in my head’ ‘anxiety’ ‘psychosomatic’ ‘mental health’ I’ve heard it all. The first gastro I ever saw actually thought it was Crohns but as a lot of people aren’t aware a certain amount of your small intestine is missed on a colonoscopy and endoscopy and of course this happens to be where my crohns lies. Once my scopes came back clear or minimally showing anything it went down the road of a teenage girl or inferring that I was doing it to myself. Come June 2022 I still couldn’t keep anything down and I had my first NJ tube placed to feed me into my small intestine. Alleviating some of the symptoms I was feeling but I never felt the same, telling them something was wrong, my symptoms weren’t right but my story was changed to fit their story of teenage girl, it’s mental health, ‘not real’. Those words in itself were the most soul destroying words you can hear when it’s so real. Fast forward to January 2023 my health got so much worse with tube feeds still going I began to feel like everything was going straight through me. All these new symptoms started popping up or just a more severe version of what I was already feeling, then I got my first high Calprotectin reading after everything else was coming back clear. I thought surely this was my key, the answer, I gained some hope that now I’d be listened too. Oh how I soon found out I was wrong. Two more high calprotectin readings just getting worse, multiple hospital admissions being told it wasn’t real, my pain wasn’t real it was all down to my mind. July 2023 I got a phone call saying that there was a cancellation for a private gastro at this point we had been scrambling to get in with anyone, we were losing hope but then we walked into his rooms and was instantly greeted by no this is real and a gasp at how high my calprotectin was and to have had no testing done not even scopes for a year. I then had a pill cam study done, to which found extensive Crohns from my jej to ileum. My journey is far from over but I’m extremely glad to say that I’ve started steroids and now after having no effect they’ve been upped and I ate for the first time in over a year without vomiting. Although I still have a lot of obstacles to overcome there’s some hope to my story now and I can’t wait to share my journey and fight with Crohns. As well as this September raising money for Crohns and Colitis to live fearlessly. This is a short version of my story but gives some insight ?