Dream trip to the Big Apple turns into nightmare
IT’S not every day someone from Rochdale gets invited to New York Fashion Week one of the four major fashion weeks in the world.
For fashionista Lucy Jane, it was a childhood dream come true.
Lucy Jane is a local fashion blogger who has openly documented her journey of living with Ulcerative Colitis.
This is a long-term condition where the colon and rectum become inflamed, and small ulcers can develop on the colon’s lining, which can bleed.
As a result of the bowel disease, Lucy opted to have a colostomy when she was just 19, meaning she would now have to use a stoma bag. However, this does not stop Lucy from being stylish with a stoma, as the online blogger has gained quite an impressive following online sharing her thrifty finds and style tips.
When the 24-year-old was selected by skincare brand Cetaphil to join them at NYFW, it felt like she had won the jackpot. However, just two days in, Lucy’s dream trip turned into a nightmare.
“Honestly, when I found out I had won, I was so shocked. I screamed the house down I was so excited.
“Like London Fashion Week seems achievable but NYFW never felt achievable. Someone from Rochdale doesn’t just go to NYFW so when I found out that I won the competition it was honestly the best news I ever got and I just couldn’t wait to go,” she said.
Lucy arrived in New York on Wednesday (February 7) and instantly fell in love with the Big Apple. Blown away by the incredible views, Lucy said she “felt like royalty” from the second she landed as the red carpet was rolled out for the Rochdale influencer.
She even got to bring a friend on the trip, and the pair enjoyed venturing around Soho, eating food in the city and visiting the iconic Central Park. It’s as close to living out your best Sarah Jessica Parker life as it gets for a fashion lover.
But things seemed too good to be true. After attending dinner with the brand on Thursday, Lucy woke in the middle of the night feeling really unwell.
She said: “I got up to go to the toilet to be sick thinking it was just something I had eaten because American food can be quite rich compared to English food, so I didn’t really think anything of it.
“I woke up Friday morning and took some paracetamol because I was feeling a bit under the weather but nothing crazy. That day we had an immersive skincare session planned where we were going to meet with professionals and get a massage.
“I made my way up to the suite where it was all happening, and I started to feel really unwell. I went really sick.
“You know when you’re supposed to be on top form and you’re not, I just started getting in my head like ‘I hope I’m alright’ and ‘what’s going on’ type of thing. I ploughed through and I did this session, but all the while I was listening to them talk about skincare, my stomach was in bits.”
Lucy said it’s not uncommon to experience mild pain with a stoma bag, as often you can get bad trapped wind which she says “you can’t push it out like you normally can.” With Lucy’s normal remedies to help the wind pass failing, the pain became so “crippling” she struggled to get out of bed.
Having phoned
mum back in the UK, she described the pain as something she had “never felt before”, and not long after she started throwing up despite having had nothing to eat that day.
Being in a foreign country, Lucy was unfamiliar with the healthcare system, describing the experience as “scary” as the young woman tried to figure out the best course of action. She attended an urgent care with her friend, which she described as similar to a GP, who then referred her to emergency care which is comparable to A&E.
Lucy said: “I got to emergency care at around 8 pm, I was in agony, I couldn’t stop throwing up at this point. They put me in a room and gave me some pain medication because the pain was ridiculous - I’ve never had pain like it.
“They said they were going to take me for a CAT scan (CT scan) to look at my bowel. At that point I’d only been there about half an hour, it’s crazy how quickly they managed to see me.
“An hour and a half later they came back and told me I had a big obstruction in my bowel and I needed to be sent to hospital because they couldn’t treat it in emergency care.
“I don’t really remember the rest of it after that because of the pain medication I had taken, and I was in a lot of agony.”
Doctors then hooked Lucy up to a nasogastric (NG) tube - a flexible plastic tube inserted into a person’s nose and threaded into the stomach, used for treatments such as sucking excess fluids out of the stomach and delivering medicines. It also can deliver fluid that contains nutrients directly into the stomach.
“My small bowel was blocked, and they didn’t know what with or why, so my stoma couldn’t work which is why I was being sick. Once I was admitted to hospital in the early hours of Saturday morning, I was set up with the NG tube which sucks out all the stuff behind the blockage to give your bowel a rest.
“I’ve never had an NG tube before and I never want it again - it was horrible.
“I wasn’t eating or drinking.
“The idea is your bowel is put on rest and it might eventually start working again. I’d spoken to a few other people online who had experienced the same thing, and they said it was a bit of a waiting game which is not fun because you’re just lying there thinking ‘Is this going to work?’”
Tragically for Lucy, the treatment did not work and on Monday (February
12), doctors informed her she would need emergency surgery. At first, medical experts thought she would just need keyhole surgery however discovered Lucy’s bowels and stoma had twisted, meaning they would have to operate again..
She said: “They had to cut me open again and fix everything because they basically said if they hadn’t operated sooner rather than later, my bowel could have burst.
“I don’t know what would have happened and I don’t want to think what would have happened.”
Lucy went into “autopilot mode” while she was in hospital. She struggled to go through such a huge surgery without her parents by her side and being so far from home.
When she was discharged on Friday (February 16), Lucy said that’s when everything hit her and the terrifying ordeal took a toll on her mental health.
While she is grateful to be recovering in a hotel with her dad by her side, Lucy says being away from hospital has given her time to “think and process” her major surgery making it “hard to stay positive.”
She said: “I just want to get home now really.
“We’re just waiting for confirmation from a surgeon that I’m fit to fly which I’m hoping that I am. We are hoping I can fly home on Friday (February 23) because I’ve been in New York for way too long - and I never thought I’d say that but I
honestly cannot wait to leave New York. There are a lot of factors playing into why I’m feeling quite negative right now without my friends and family.
“I’ve got my dad here which is amazing but I still just want to get back - I want my own bed, I want my mum’s food, I want my home comforts.
“Recovery-wise, physically this feels a lot easier to get back on my feet. I mean I can’t walk for longer than 10 minutes but compared to my last surgery it took me weeks to do that.
“Mentally this surgery feels a bit of a slap in the face. I’m a very positive person and with my last surgery I took it as ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ and it gave me my life back, I got control again, and having my stoma bag was the best thing that could ever happen to me.
“But then, this surgery and this experience came at a time when I had my life back and I was living my childhood dream, and this all happened and took it away from me.
“I need to stop dwelling on the fact that’s what happened and kind of accept it, but at the minute I’m struggling to find a reason as to why this all happened when it did.
“At the end of the day, I just have to tell myself
‘Yeah, I missed the most exciting opportunity that ever happened to me but I missed it because I had to get better.’
“If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything.
“As hard as it is for me to accept this has all happened, this incredible opportunity has flipped on its head I have to remind myself I still got there, I still got invited, I still had the opportunity.
“It doesn’t take away that I still achieved one of my dreams, even if I didn’t get to live it.
“I know in a few months when I build myself back up and feel better, I’ll look back and realise I still had two amazing days in New York.
“Even though I didn’t get to live the dream, I still got here and I managed to survive.”
‘They had to cut me open again and fix everything because they basically said if they hadn’t operated sooner rather than later, my bowel could have burst’