Back on a positive note

Fame Academy vocal coach Carrie Grant is determined that a painful digestive disease won't stop her from enjoying her family and pursuing a successful career

Carrie Grant has been suffering from the potentially life-threatening bowel condition Chron's disease since she was 18. Even now, after having three children, the vocal coach is still prone to excruciating stomach pains that can stop her from eating solid food for weeks.
"A couple of years ago, all I had was a nutritional drink supplied by the hospital for 90 days," she says.
Carrie, now 43, lives in London with husband David, 51, and their children - Olivia, 13, Talia, six and Imogen, two. She's one of around 60,000 people in the UK who suffer from the disease, which causes inflammation, ulcers and scarring to the wall of the intestine.
"some sufferers can go for months without symptoms, but I have constant stomach ache and diarrhoea so I live with low level pain most of the time," she explains.
"I first started feeling ill 25 years ago. I had diarrhoea and was losing bloos," she recalls.

The long road to treatment
"Blood tests didn't show any abnormalities, but the symptoms persisted for two years. By then I was getting skin rashes, lumps down my shinbones and mouth ulcers. Then I saw something on TV about Chron's and I knew I had it."
When her consultant confirmed the diagnosis, Carrie thought her life and career were over.
"The tests showed that I had damage throughout my large and small bowel," she says. "The chron's had left certain sections, or 'strictures', withered. Leaving me unable to absorb food through the bowel lining and causing the diarrhoea and pain. I was then put on anti-inflammatory drugs,"
A food elimination diet found that Carrie had an intolerance to dairy products, nuts, lamb and caffine. "My bowel was so damaged that I had to have surgery," she says. Twenty centimetres of her large bowel were removed and doctors discovered that her bowel was very narrow, which was causing the pain.
"I needed to have colonoscopies [an internal examination that allows doctors to check the condition of the lining of the intestine] every three months to try to alleviate the problem," she adds.
In 1999, part of Carrie's bowel split after a colonoscopy, and she needed an emergency blood transfusion.
"Luckily the bowel repaired itself and it just increased my determination not to let the condition ruin my life," she says. "I'm just grateful for every day that I'm not in too much pain."

Change of perspective
These days Carrie admits that coping with the disease is more of a mental battle. "I sometimes find it difficult to watch David eat, and if we're out to dinner with friends, I just have to sit there with a glass of water, smelling their food!
Chron's disease never goes away, but I feel more in control now," she says. "It used to really get me down, which just made me more ill, but now I'm much more positive."

Visit www.nhs.uk/carrie-grant for more information