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I felt such a loo-ser!

Doctors reckoned I was constipated, but it was the size of a melon!


Published by: Fiona Ford
Published on: 5th March 2010

My eyes screwed up with pain, I reached inside the bathroom cabinet for the laxatives.
Quickly shoving some in my mouth, I sank into a heap on the floor, praying for relief.
I was 14, and suffering from terrible stomach aches.
One minute I was right as rain, the next doubled over in agony.
At first, I’d done my best to ignore it. But after a couple of weeks watching me howl in pain as EastEnders blared out the telly, my mum Karen, 49, had put her foot down.
‘We’re going to the doctors, she’d said, firmly.
Fear gripped my heart.
I was terrified of doctors.
When I was six, I’d been diagnosed as having neurofibromatosis, a painful disease that affected my nerve endings, and left my body covered in lumps.
Mum had been convinced it was eczema but, after a number of tests, the doctors had given us the news.
‘Is there no treatment?’ Mum had asked, horrified.
They’d shaken their heads.
‘The lumps sometimes go away on their own,’ the doctor had explained.
‘But if they grow in places like your eyes, they can cause blindness.’
I’d been horrified and, as a result, spent most of my childhood in fear I was going to lose my sight, or worse.
I became a hypochondriac, and the kids at school didn’t help either.
‘Lumpy, bumpy,’ they’d called, as I undressed for PE.
So, sat in the waiting room, I’d been convinced the doctor would tell me this was another symptom.
But after a thorough check-up, he’d had surprising news.
‘It’s constipation,’ he’d said.
I’d looked at Mum in shock.
I’d never had any problems going to the loo.
‘Are you sure?’ she’d asked. ‘She’s been in a lot of pain.’
‘It is painful,’ the doctor had agreed. ’But nothing that a couple of laxatives can’t cure.’
I’d been over the moon.
I wasn’t dying – I was just a bit blocked up!
So Mum had made sure I was well stocked up with laxatives, the same ones I was reaching for now.
The only trouble was, they hadn’t stopped the pains.
I wasted hours sat on the loo, but still hunched over in pain. Armed with books and magazines, I’d never read so much in my life.
Worst of all, I was still crippled with agony.
If I tried leaving the house, I spent most of the time holed up in a public loo.
‘You okay?’ Mum would call as the queue grew longer behind her.
‘Fine,’ I called to her. ‘It’s just these laxatives…!’
After a couple of months, though, Mum reached breaking point and marched me back to the doctors, who referred me to hospital.
For almost a year, I was prodded and poked by what felt like hundreds of doctors. Finally…
‘It’s constipation,’ shrugged the hospital doctor.
I felt like screaming. ‘But I don’t have any trouble, you know, going to the loo,’ I insisted.
But the doctors were adamant.
I needed to stick with the laxatives.
So I did.
By now, kids at school were having a field day with me.
‘Caught short again, Sophie?’ they’d giggle.
I did my best to ignore it.
I got to school, opened my locker – and rolls and rolls of loo paper came tumbling out.
Spinning around, I found all the kids in my year laughing at me.
Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t take any more. Not only had I been trying to cope with two years of agony, but now this as well!
Soon I’d be turning 16. To celebrate and cheer me up, Mum organised a surprise.
‘We’re going to Florida,’ she announced. ‘You deserve a treat.’
‘Can we go to Disneyland?’ I screamed excitedly.
‘Course,’ she beamed.
But from the moment we landed, I could barely walk. Instead of running around in the sunshine, I spent most of the holiday curled up in the hotel room, groaning in agony.
Flushed with pain, I returned home miserable and fed-up.
The laxatives didn’t work, and I couldn’t see a way forward.
‘This is just the way it is,’ I sobbed miserably to Mum.
‘I don’t think so,’ she raged.
Clutching my hand, she marched me into the doctor’s surgery and burst into his office.
‘My daughter can’t spend every waking moment trapped in the loo,’ she boomed. ‘I want answers now.’
‘Mum!’ I hissed, going red.
‘I’m serious,’ she fumed. ‘She can’t go on like this.’
Realising she wasn’t kidding, I was finally referred for a CT scan at Scunthorpe General Hospital, Lincolnshire.
A week later, they had the results. Walking into the consultant’s office, I braced myself to be told once more that I simply had constipation.
But this time things were different.
‘We found something on the CT scan,’ the specialist explained.
Mum clutched my hand as a million thoughts raced through my mind. Was it my appendix? Some horrible complication of my neurofibromatosis? Cancer even?
‘It’s a cyst,’ the consultant said. ‘And it has nothing at all to do with your neurofibromatosis.’
A cyst?!
‘It’s seven inches by seven inches, and on your right ovary,’ the consultant continued.
Surely he was joking. ‘That’s the size of a… a… melon,’ I spat.
I’d had such bad stomach aches, because this huge cyst was crushing my other organs.
I drifted off into my own world as I tried imagining something that big inside my tummy.
Suddenly, something he said caught my attention again.
‘Did you just say… I’d have problems having kids?’
‘Sorry but, yes, I did,’ he said.
Gently the consultant explained that because the cyst was so large, and had been there so long, my ovary had been badly damaged.
‘We need to remove the ovary at the same time we remove the cyst,’ he said. ‘Leaving you with a 50 per cent chance of having children.’
I shot out of the office in tears.
All I had wanted was for the pain to go away – but now the solution I’d been given would cause me
more pain than ever.
‘I’ve always dreamed of having my own family one day,’ I cried to Mum, as she came after me.
Now to be told there was a risk it might not happen was too much.
I don’t know how I got through the next few weeks.
Going in for the operation, I was so scared. But waking up afterwards, I found Mum by my side.
‘It went really well, love,’ she smiled. ‘The doctors say you’ll be pain-free in no time.’
But with the possibility of never having kids, we both knew that wasn’t true.
Shortly after the operation, I left school and worked at all sorts of jobs to make cash. I made new friends and threw myself into life.
Then three years after my op, the unthinkable happened – I fell pregnant!
‘It’s fantastic,’ I babbled to Mum. ‘The best news ever.’
Even better, three months after giving birth to my son Ellis, I fell pregnant again.
Now me and my boyfriend Kris, 27, are also proud parents to our daughter Meisha, who is now nine months old.
For the first time in my life, I feel I can truly look forwards… and not for the nearest loo!

Sophie Roberts, 22, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire