An undiagnosed, rare gastrointestinal condition left a 32-year old UK woman in “excruciating” pain for 16 months before a life-saving emergency operation.
In January 2020, Rebecca Bostock started to experience stomach swelling and had difficult keeping her food down. After she was rushed into hospital on Good Friday this year, her mysterious illness was found to be Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome (SMAS).
“I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through,” she said.
Ms Bostock, 32, underwent an emergency operation at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. Nurses there told her they had only treated three cases of SMAS in 27 years. She was also told that she likely survived because she had been rushed into hospital on that day.
“My stomach was swollen so much that I couldn’t breathe, I was being sick and couldn’t keep any medication down,” Ms Bestock said. “I was on a downward spiral. They took me into imaging and diagnosed SMAS and I was taken away for the operation. They said I needed the operation straight away or I wouldn’t survive even a couple more hours.”
Ms Bostock said she had been experiencing pain for 16 months, with stomach swelling, fever, sickness, diarrhoea and dizziness, and visited the GP and emergency departments several times. She was told there that the pain was likely to be caused by endometriosis or irritable bowel syndrome.
“I was referred to a gynaecologist around the time of the first lockdown but everything shut down and I didn’t see one for months,” she said. “I was advised to change my diet, which seemed to help at first, but then the symptoms deteriorated again to the point where I struggled to walk and couldn’t breathe.”
SMAS is a rare disease, affecting some 0.1 to 0.3% of the population, and is defined as compression of the third portion of the duodenum between the abdominal aorta and the superior mesenteric artery. It is now mostly treated by laparoscopic duodenojejunostomy. The operation released the blockage, “re-plumbing” her stomach as the surgeon told her.
She is still unable to eat solid foods but hopes to introduce them to her diet soon and wants to raise awareness of the rare condition so that others can learn to spot the signs earlier.
“I want to tell my story to raise awareness I feel blessed and relieved,” she said. “I’m so thankful to the doctors and nurses who saved my life. I get so emotional thinking about it and I can’t thank them enough. It is so rare and even doctors don’t know about it, so helping people to spot the signs and be able to rule it out is so important.”
Source: BBC News
