A young woman will never be able to eat again due to a rare condition that causes her to get extremely sick and experience excruciating pain when eating.
30-year-old Jemma Levy was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome 17 years after she first began noticing the symptoms of the disease.
Nowadays, even something as basic as drinking water can cause unbearable pain, meaning that the young lady has to be attached to a feeding tube for the majority of the time.
As London-based Jemma revealed, her condition has worsened and she now gets sick several times per day even though she doesn’t eat at all.
Due to the extent of the syndrome, the 30-year-old’s husband, Alex, works as her carer beside his regular job.
“Alex has never complained, despite becoming my carer and having to do so much to help me every day. In the last 18 months my life has changed beyond recognition. My entire digestive system is paralyzed. It does not work,” Jemma said in an interview with FEMAIL.
“I spend my life in hospitals, having operations, at doctors and lying on the sofa. I spend 22 hours a day tied to a drip machine to ‘feed’ me. I vomit constantly, even though my stomach is empty as everything has to go through my feeding tube.
“I am rarely alone and need constant care and support from my family. I will never be able to eat again. I will never have that sushi, chocolate or birthday cake I used to live for. I will always be reliant on tubes and medicines to survive. But with my family and friends by my side, EDS will never, ever beat me.”
As Jemma added, she believes her condition wouldn’t progress this far if doctors took her symptoms seriously at an early stage.
“I strongly believe that if the doctors had told my parents when I was 12 that my delayed stomach emptying needed monitoring and could become more severe, I would not be in the state I am now, where nothing more can be done to help,” she expressed.
“By the time I got help, the paralysis of my digestive system was so severe that none of the treatment options or surgeries worked. If I’d have known earlier, something could have been done.
“I struggle to put into words the impact EDS has had on my life … EDS is not the issue as such, it’s the conditions it causes that are life changing.”
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Replaced!