Digestive condition a huge battle
Georgie Ferris is desperate to get on with her life.
In the last four years, the already petite woman has struggled to keep any food down, lost 15 kilograms, and had three bowel surgeries.
‘‘One night I became sick and it never stopped.’’
She was 17-years-old when she started to experience the first symptoms of what would develop into a severe digestive condition.
She was the same weight as twin sister Livvie but now weighs 41 kilograms.
She lives off supplement drinks and custard. Food makes her stomach swell up so she looks pregnant. Fruits, vegetables, rice and pasta are especially bad.
She is so thin, people often assume she either has cancer or an eating disorder.
There are nights when she has woken up in her own vomit and she has to carry a container with her wherever she goes.
In 2015, Georgie was diagnosed with gastroparesis, a condition where the stomach is unable to empty itself of food properly.
She said in people with a well functioning bowel, 100 per cent of their food would move from the stomach to small intestine over three hours. However for Georgie, only 18 per cent of food is digested in that time frame.
This causes nausea, vomiting and blockages in her bowel.
When the pain is severe, she is struck by seizures. She described her stomach as feeling like it was a ‘‘facecloth that was being wrung out’’.
‘‘It is a pretty debilitating illness, it is incredibly hard to live with.
‘‘There are days where I sit there bawling my eyes out.
‘‘But you can’t let it get you down, because otherwise you have got nothing.’’
The first signs that something was not right with her bowel started four years ago.
After more than a year battling digestive problems, Georgie was told a colostomy was her only option. It involved taking a section of her large intestine to form an opening in her abdomen, which acted as an outlet for waste.
Georgie said she was ‘‘petrified’’ of having to live with a colos- tomy bag. She didn’t want to have the surgery, but her family helped to convince her that it would give her the best chance of leading a normal life.
But the surgery didn’t go according to plan and she spent close to two weeks seriously ill in hospital.
‘‘It went horrifically wrong, it was the worst 12 days of my life.’’
Over the next few months Georgie had another two surgeries to correct the problems, the last to reverse the colostomy and create a ileostomy, a similar procedure which involved a section of the small intestine being used to form an opening in her abdomen.
The third surgery took a ‘‘massive toll’’ on her body, a blockage in her stomach caused her to go into full gastro-intestinal failure.
She spent eight weeks at Auck- land Hospital with a specialised intestinal failure team due to complications from the surgery.
For the next 10 months, she was fed through self-administered IV nutrition, bags full of white nutritional fluid that mum Robyn said ‘‘smelt like pig fat’’.
But she was able to live more of a normal life and she put on weight.
‘‘Life was great on it, I had a life, I was still at school, through correspondence.’’
However she developed infections in the Hickman line used to administer the IV nutrition. It then developed into a serious blood infection which saw her rushed to Auckland Hospital by air ambulance.
She refused to have another Hickman Line inserted due to the risk of developing blood poisoning again.
The next stage of her recovery is working out how to get the nutrition she needed to maintain a healthy weight.
‘‘The reality is people with this condition do starve to death.’’
With treatment options exhausted in New Zealand, Georgie said seeing a gastroenterologist in Melbourne who specialised in the condition was her best hope.
‘‘There’s no cure for this illness, it is all about managing it.’’
The costs of the trip were estimated to be around $20,000 and Georgie said while it was difficult to ask for help, she couldn’t afford to lose any more weight and was desperate for normality.
When she is well enough, she hopes to move to Auckland and study to be a pediatric nurse.
‘‘I am going over there for lifechanging treatment, I want to get on with my life.’’
Georgie’s family have started a Givealittle page and are holding fundraisers to help get her to Melbourne for treatment. They have raised more than $5000 toward the cause so far.