My journey with MALS

 

 

   For five years, I’ve been dealing with horrible stomach pains. Over the last eight months, it has gotten worse. I first noticed my pain when I was about twelve years old.  My mom thought it was just growing pains so we shoved it off until one night I was rushed to the ER. I remember we had nachos that night so the nurse said maybe it was what I ate... I knew he was wrong though because back then, I was a bigger kid and I ate everything. I had never had a pain like this before. So they got an IV running and did a few tests and they found nothing. We went back home with my stomach still hurting. The only thing I found that helped the slightest was a heating pad. Little did I know that thing would become my best friend for the next few years ahead. 

  The more things I ate the more I realized that something was off. I used to always be able to eat queso and pizza. We cannot forget the pizza. But one night I had two slices and not three minutes later I was in excruciating pain. This became more and more  persistent so finally my mom took me to the doctor. He ran every test imaginable and everything came back negative. He told us there’s nothing he can do so we moved on to a different doctor. We did this a couple more times until we met a GI specialist here in Georgia. I had what is called a HIDA scan where they checked the function of my gallbladder. Turns out my gallbladder wasn’t working properly so we scheduled a surgery to remove it. We waited a few days to see what would happen but my pain was still the same. We went back to my GI doctor and he said he doesn’t know what else to do. This sort of became a trend and we visited so many different specialists and doctors. I had every GI test imaginable and some even more than once. My pain is so bad that it affected my high school experience. I would arrive to school in the morning and only get through one or two classes then I’d have to come back home and use my heating pad. This lasted for four years and completely ruined every opportunity I had. During this process, we found one more doctor we could try. His name is Dr.Patel. We found out that I have a condition called MALS and he performed a laparoscopic surgery to release and clip some nerve bundles which is what caused my pain. I was of course out of school recuperating and we thought “hey, maybe this is it! Maybe he fixed it”. But of course it didn’t fix it. It helped some only for a short amount of time but I found myself having to completely stop going to school. My senior year I ended up having no choice but to teach myself a year’s worth of physics and Spanish, ALL BY MYSELF. I stopped going to school before Coronavirus even started. I haven’t been to school since February. It was the most difficult thing I had to do but I did it. I graduated and I am so proud of myself.