Meet Melodie, a young woman living with Crohn’s disease. Despite initially being misdiagnosed, she didn’t give up and found hope through treatment and support.
Have you ever felt that something was not quite right with your body, but everyone else said you’re fine or they try to tell you it’s not what you think it is? Well, that happened to Melodie Narain Blackwell, a wife, mother and former working professional.
Melodie suffers with Crohn’s, an Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and initially, before her official diagnosis, she felt pain in her joints. She was told it was rheumatoid arthritis, but she felt it was something more than that.
“I had debilitating arthritis they kept writing it off as gout. It got so bad that my joints were literally stuck, and I was crawling on the floor,” explains Melodie. “I began doing my own research because I realized something else was going on with me.”
Besides the arthritic joint pain, Melodie was losing her hair and had regular eye infections. Eventually, she began to bleed from her colon. She finally had an MRI and doctors could see something was going on with her immune system but weren’t sure exactly what.
Melodie suffers with Crohn’s, and wants to share her story. Credit: Blackdoctor.org
After constantly being misdiagnosed, she became seriously ill and required surgery. After her second surgery, she finally received a correct diagnosis. She had an autoimmune disease (AD) called Crohn’s.
Nearly 24 million Americans suffer from autoimmune diseases. Crohn’s is one of the autoimmune diseases that affects more African Americans and especially African-American women. The average age for Crohn’s diagnosis is 15 to 35 years old.
Not knowing anything about autoimmune diseases, Melodie soon discovered having one is when your immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells, tissue and organs. Autoimmune diseases can attack almost any part of your body and some may affect more than one part of the body. The cause of autoimmune diseases is not known and there are no cures, but some are treated with immunosuppressive medication and corticosteroids which helps to reduce the immune system’s hyperactivity.
Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which affects the lining of the intestine, is one of the more than 80 chronic illnesses that fall under autoimmune diseases. The two main forms of IBD are Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.
