AN Irish woman has spoken about how doctors thought she had a basketball injury, was being bullied, or suffered from an eating disorder before finally discovering she had Crohn’s disease. When she was younger, Victoria Spillane couldn’t understand what was wrong with her as she started getting pains in her left knee and lower back. Medics initially thought it was from playing basketball regularly.
She told us: “Back in those days, it was the late 90s, inflammatory bowel disease wasn’t very prevalent in society, so I think with a lot of GPs, it wasn’t very well known to them to even spot the signs. “So it started with things [like] ‘Oh, it could be a basketball injury that was causing the pains and aches that I had’.” But doctors started to think something else was going on with her.
She continued: “When the other symptoms started to come on, it was a case of, ‘Was I being bullied in school for me to be stressed’. Then when I was losing so much weight because I just couldn’t eat, the GP would ask my parents in front of me, ‘Would she have an eating disorder?’ “I remember sitting down at 13 saying, ‘No I don’t have any of these things, I don’t know what's wrong with me’.” Her whole body was starting to be affected, as she recalled: “My parents were bringing me to the GP because the pain just wouldn't go away.
"Then a few months after those pains started everything else started to come on, I would have diarrhoea up to 20 times a day, s.