Hello and welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog. All about health – physical and mental that is – they are of course both as important as each other and its about time society begin to remember this.

Well my name is Jess and I am 23 years old. My current diagnoses are as follows:

• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
• Dystonia
• Ehlers Danlos Syndrome Type 3
• Chronic Linear Atelectasis
• Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Depression & Anxiety
• Asperger’s Syndrome (Autistic Spectrum Disorder)

Now I have probably missed some off the list – it is difficult to remember them all – especially when many conditions have different names depending on the doctor explaining it to you. In many places my hospital records have two or three different conditions but in actual fact they are all just different names for the same condition. As if it isn’t confusing enough!

I will go into all of my diagnoses in much more detail at a later date but for the time being lets continue my introduction.

So I live at home with my mum and step dad, my cat Tilly and our family dog Ellie. Due to my health problems I am currently completely bed bound and I have been for 14 months now – jeez these four walls are getting way past boring!

Hopefully in the near future I will be no longer bed bound and I will be able to get around in a motorized wheelchair as I am going to be having my left leg amputated but I will go into that in much more detail very soon.

With my blog I am hoping that people will be able to find it informative and helpful especially in their early days of being diagnosed. I remember when I was diagnosed with many of my conditions it is a very scary time where everything is suddenly the unknown. Many of my conditions are ‘rare’ so there is a limited amount of information about them in the health field and many a time the doctor actually giving me the diagnosis is just as clueless as you are. So hopefully my blog could cover that gap in information for some people.

I am also hoping people can follow my amputation journey via my blog. I plan on doing daily updates around the time of having my amputation and nothing will be held back. If I am going to give people information then I am going to give it all – not just half as what use would that be.

Goodnight for now

Jess x