Since 4th grade, Jessica Terry was living with an indeterminable stomach disease. Eight years later in a science class, Jessica diagnosed her own illness. Momlogic talked to Jessica and her mom about their journey, and how she's doing today.
When Jessica was in the 4th grade, doctors diagnosed her with an indeterminable stomach disease. This illness gave her severe stomach pain, diarrhea, and vomiting. Stress inflamed her symptoms, she was in and out of the hospital, she lost 30 pounds, and then gained 60 from the steroids she was put on. She was the butt of everyone's jokes. "People didn't even ask if something was wrong, they just made fun of me," Jessica said.
For a mom, watching her child go through not just sickness but bullying at school was awful. Jessica's mom Colleen tells us, "She would come home from middle school, having gained 30 or 40 pounds from the medicine, and her peers were ridiculing her, her coaches wouldn't play her in sports. They didn't even know what was wrong."
Cut to senior year. Jessica is taking a special science class where they'll study a specific illness for several weeks. Jessica and her team decided to study her symptoms, focusing on Crohn's disease. "My group studied the normal cells and my teacher paired us with a pathologist." Her doctor let her take her own slides to study, but Jessica didn't think she would find anything. "I just wanted to compare them with the normal cells. What I found was like a needle in a haystack."
Jessica says, "I looked at 32 tiny slides of tissue, I looked at the digestive cells. I kept searching and searching and then I found something that looked different. I sent it to a scientist, and we did Internet research comparing the picture. It was Crohn's disease."
Jessica said it wasn't that "she found it and the pathologist didn't," it was more like, "Wow, if anything, I've learned the importance of second opinions."
Jessica Terry and her parents
Now, though still experiencing bouts of extreme sickness, Jessica has hope. She has written a book for parents and kids about what it's like growing up sick -- a child version on one side of the page and an adult version on the other. It's a "you're not alone" book, says Jessica, who said being in the hospital surrounded by kids with terminal cancer gave her a sense of hope. "I never went there and didn't see a smile on their faces. They were so positive. They were like, maybe there's no tomorrow, but we can do this fun thing later today!"
Jessica is moving forward. She's off to nursing school soon and is "not scared. I want to help educate kids and their parents about how to make things better."
We have no doubt she will.
LINK
