It didn’t start loud. There were no sirens, no dramatic collapse, no doctor gasping in shock. just a slow, quiet unravelling that only I seemed to notice.
August 2016: I’d had my second daughter. Life was a blur and I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Everyone said it was normal. “You’ve got two under two” I nodded and kept going.
But something was off.
My stomach felt swollen and wrong. Cramps would come out of nowhere. An urgency would drop into me mid-conversation and I’d panic: where’s the toilet? How long do I have?
I went to the GP smiled and said, “Hormones.” I wanted to believe it.
By January 2017 I moved from Townsville to Mount Isa. It wasn't the 12 hour drive with 2 young kids that concerned me, I was terrified of shitting myself.
Things escalated. Bloating became excruciating stabbing pain. Urgency became constant. Then came the blood.
I went back to GPs who called it haemorrhoids, one referred to them as “butt berries.”
I went through the banding procedures to hopefully stop the constant blood loss and that did nothing.
I started taking photos on my phone because I needed evidence I could show a clinician without them underestimating just how bad things were.
Blood. Mucus. Pain. Nausea. Night sweats. Brain fog. Skin Rashes, Exhaustion so deep I couldn’t think straight.
Eventually I was referred for a colonoscopy. The prep was brutal and I had convinced myself that I had Bowel cancer.
Waking up from the scope and being told no cancer felt like the best news! Until the diagnosis: IBS aka Irritable Bowel Syndrome “Avoid gluten, try low FODMAP, reduce stress.” I was told.
My symptoms were so severe and relentless that I tried everything: paleo, vegan, carnivore, gluten-free, dairy-free, thousands on supplements. The diet helped sometimes, then didn’t. I blamed myself. I believed I was broken.
Between 2018 and 2020 I was in the emergency department so often I lost count.
IV fluids, morphine, told to “manage my IBS” keep a food diary and sent home. No stool tests. No scopes. Nobody acted. I blamed myself for why this was happening. I felt crazy.
By 2020 I was exhausted in every sense. My relationship broke under the weight of it and I had hit an all time low.
I felt disgusting, worthless, shameful and that I was hiding a dirty secret.
I tried to rebuild.
In doing that I met my now-husband and, because I still didn't really know what was happening to me, I told him I had a gluten intolerance and eat a really strict diet. But he didn’t bat an eye. His nanna actually had something called Crohn’s Disease. A term I had never heard before but meant that he understood what I was going through in a way others hadn’t.
In my third pregnancy, it temporarily quieted things.
I latched onto any study that explained immune suppression in pregnancy helped people recover from IBS and was seen as a "miracle cure" but the relief didn’t last.
When my son was born and a few weeks old it came back harder.
I lived in nappies again, hiding them under loose clothes. I avoided leaving the house unless absolutely necessary.
Then there was what I call "the Woolies moment". A full trolley, freezer aisle then the unstoppable, unpredictable drop in my stomach I’d felt a thousand times before, but this time, there was nothing I could do.
I didn’t make it...
I paused. Left the trolley, walked out calm, smiled at the security guard as I walked past, drove home and then cried. I cried harder than I had ever cried before. I threw the clothes away because I couldn’t wash them with the family’s laundry. It wasn’t just humiliation; it was a grief for a life shrinking around fear.
I simply didn't want to exist any more. I can't live like this. I just...can't.
August 2023 changed everything.
Ten days into what I now know as a flare, unable to keep down food or fluids, dizzy, grey, unable to stand. I passed out while changing my son’s nappy.
My partner called an ambulance.
In ED I showed them the photos. The blood filled toilets, the sheets, blood stained vomit. But just like every other time this has happened, They gave me IV fluids, morphine, bloods test and, inexplicably, sent me home with antibiotics for a presumed UTI despite me saying I had no issues with urinating and felt nothing like one. But hey, what would I know?
Twelve hours after I was sent home, I collapsed again. This time my blood pressure was so low that the paramedics had me "upside down" in the ambulance to force the blood back into my heart and rushed me in.
This time, for the first time since 2017, they acted. They did a sigmoid scope.
The screen didn’t lie: severe ulcerative colitis. I was admitted immediately, started on high-dose IV steroids, chemotherapy medication and immunomodulators.
My UCEIS score was 6–7 (maximum is 8!). I was also diagnosed anaemic from chronic blood loss.
For the first time in years someone has given me a reason for what was happening to me. I wasn't crazy, I wasn't failing at my food diary, I wasn't making it up or too stressed. I felt seen, yet furious.
How had so many chances to act been missed? How close had I come to not making it?
Diagnosis brought no instant redemption. It brought a reckoning. The label didn’t erase the years of pretending, the shame, the self-loathing. For a long time I felt like a walking symptom, leaking, cramping, bleeding. A thing to be managed rather than a person. I chased validation in the wrong places because I’d stopped believing I was worth steadier things.
I started scrolling support groups from my hospital bed and realised I wasn’t alone. People posted nakedly honest threads, photos from hospital beds, scopes, tips, rants even. The community was full of people and generous.
I tentatively joined in, asked questions, shared experiences, and found a hand to hold through the screen.
I deep dived into the world of IBD. The statistics around it, the information ( or lack there of), the woo woo guru, everything. I would save things in my notes and then was able to join in on conversations and help others that were new to the online groups too. From August 2023 when I was diagnosed to February 2024, they were the only people apart from my family that knew.
Out of that, I wrote The Ultimate IBD Handbook from a place that I’d wished for when I was newly diagnosed.
When the Facebook group I’d relied on through my early days actually booted me for writing a book since it was now seen as "self promotion", I could’ve folded.
Instead, I built my own community.
I wanted awareness to be loud and engaging, not clinical pamphlets that go unread.
When I began to share and create, something else happened: I realised my trauma response was to laugh.
If you’ve been through enough humiliation, humour becomes survival. Making people laugh around the worst parts of illness stopped them being a private shame and started them being a shared, human thing.
IBD Hub combines lived experience and evidence, swapping medical jargon for humour. We created safe spaces, practical resources, and the kind of language people actually use behind closed bathroom doors.
So I hosted The Ultimate Sh*t Show, a first of its kind comedy fundraiser where I put the embarrassment on stage that made people laugh until they talked.
I built a workshop called Certified Sh*t Talker that uses blunt honesty and humour to teach workplaces about invisible illness and to help audiences stop treating digestive health like a single-person embarrassment.
IBD Hub didn’t just stay online, Along the way the work got noticed: I was nominated for Australia Day Citizen of the Year, nominated for Volunteer of the Year, and nominated for Community-Minded Business Woman of the Year. Those nominations aren’t trophies, they’re proof that making the messy visible changes how communities treat illness.
Today, I am a founder, an author, and a public speaker who still sometimes cries in supermarket carparks. I’m still the woman who plans every outing around toilet maps. But I’m also the woman who turned near-death into a platform that helps people find their voices earlier than I did. I use humour because it disarms shame. I use blunt language because it gets results. I use lived experience because journalists and audiences want the human story behind the stats.
I don’t do soft inspiration and I don’t sell a cure. I tell the truth: misdiagnosis happens, the system can fail you, but you can still build something that matters from the wreckage. IBD nearly ended me in more ways than one. Instead, it became my mission: to make IBD visible, normalise the taboos, and push for faster diagnosis so someone else doesn’t have the ambulance ride that almost took me. If that means I make people laugh while I do it — good. Laughter’s still better than shame.