Chapter 5 - What Do You Want Us to Do, Miss Tate?
On 16 June, my housemate took me to A&E. We arrived around 11 am or noon. I saw the triage nurse, had my blood taken, and settled in to wait.
The results came back: I was severely anaemic with an iron level of 81 and an inflammation level of 97. One was extremely low, the other extremely high. Translation: my body was eating itself.
I can’t remember how long I waited before the doctor called me in. I explained the last couple of weeks, the medications that hadn’t worked, the ones that made everything worse, my conviction that this was an allergic reaction.
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “What do you want us to do, Miss Tate?”
The question that broke me
I was shocked. Speechless.
Look, I know he’d probably had a long, stressful day. This was a Sunday in the A&E in a busy Brighton Hospital (a lot of weekend traffic if you know what I mean). But I didn’t deserve that. I was in agony, couldn’t eat, running to the toilet every five minutes, and felt like I’d been hit by a bus. I was losing blood by the hour and could barely walk.
I just looked at him, trying to hold it together, and all I could manage was: “I just want someone to make me better.”
My housemate left around 4 pm. Marco arrived a couple of hours later, after finishing work, just as they were admitting me and trying to find a bed.
They finally found me one at midnight. And I lucked out – I got my own room.
Hospital reality
They started me on intravenous steroids to calm the inflammation. Two days later (June 18th), I had another flexi sigmoidoscopy. The doctor performing it informed me I had characteristics of Crohn’s disease. I’d need to finish the full course of IV steroids before I could go home. My haemoglobin was down to 80 from all the blood loss, so they added an iron infusion to my collection of tubes.
I tried telling the Consultant in charge of my care that I thought this was an allergic reaction. She wouldn’t even consider it.
I pressed her: How do you go from “bowels look fine to the naked eye with mild inflammation” to “bordering on Crohn’s” within a single month?
I explained I’d never experienced anything close to this before. That it was like being pushed off a cliff the moment I started the mesalazine enemas. That there’s no history of Crohn’s in my family. That the timing was too perfect to be a coincidence.
At no point in the conversation would she entertain that possibility. All she could say, over and over, was that it was a flare. She wouldn’t even refer me to a dietitian because “apparently they didn’t do that on the NHS anymore.”
I wasn’t buying it.
Taking control
The whole nightmare started as soon as I began those mesalazine enemas. I had rashes on the backs of my hands and elbows. And here’s the thing, in the five years since, I’ve never experienced anything even remotely close to this again.
At the time, I thought it was the lactose in both types of enemas they’d given me. I had a chat with the hospital pharmacist, who confirmed that lactose is regularly used in medication as a binder. Now I know it was another ingredient I reacted to, but I don’t know which one because nobody would even admit this was a possibility.
I decided to take things into my own hands.
I reached out to a homoeopath, though I took my time finding the right one – I wanted someone medically trained. I didn’t want to give the Consultant any excuse to blame future problems on “alternative medicine nonsense.” That’s when I discovered Jessica Robertson. At the time, she was a part-time GP, and she was (probably still is) amazing. I’d recommend her to anyone. I started seeing her shortly after leaving hospital.
Freedom and food
When your diet is as restricted as mine, hospital food choices are nonexistent beyond a basic salad. I left the hospital several times to go out for lunch with Marco so I could actually eat something substantial. The Consultant praised me for being “confident enough to go out,” which I found bizarre. I still needed to know where the toilets were, but Kemp Town has plenty of cafes and pubs with friendly staff willing to share their facilities.
I left hospital a week later with a prescription for oral Prednisolone steroids that I was supposed to reduce weekly.
I reacted to those too.
When your body betrays you again
My face and legs swelled up. I looked like I remembered my Great Nan looking. I could barely walk up the stairs. Just getting down the street took forever. I had to work from bed with my feet elevated. By evening, I was dangerously wobbly on my feet.
When I called the IBD team four days later, they asked me to “persevere” until my follow-up appointment – ten days away.
I couldn’t do it. I physically couldn’t continue like this.
I turned to the internet to see what I could do. That’s when I discovered the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD).
Within a couple of days on this diet, the swelling went down. I could walk further. I was stable on my feet. I was feeling stronger every day. After five days, I was running again, something I’d done every day before this nightmare began.
Most importantly, my symptoms started disappearing.
The numbers don't lie
When I saw the IBD team after those ten days (8 July), they were impressed with how well I was doing. They asked me to reduce my steroids quicker and wanted to do a Calprotectin test when I came off them completely.
I sent in the test on 27 July.
It came back at 600. Apparently that’s as high as they can measure, so they weren’t even sure how high it actually was.
We celebrated Marco’s birthday at the end of June. Around the same time, my freelance career started taking off. Life happened in the way it does.
Chatty Sicilian, the pop-up restaurant dream, was never to be resuscitated.
But I was still standing. Barely, but standing. My body was recovering, getting stronger every day on the SCD diet.
And my period? Still missing in action.
What I didn’t know yet was that everything was about to change again. Marco would get a call that would send him back to Sicily. I’d follow him. And in between eating endless eggs, dealing with Italian bureaucracy after a break-in, and watching my hair fall out by the handful, my body would keep secrets from me.
Secrets that would only be revealed by one phone call that changed everything.