TOWIE star rushed to hospital 'looking grey' after ignoring symptoms
The Only Way Is Essex star Chloe Meadows has shared how she was rushed to hospital after ignoring some worrying health symptoms. Chloe has had a chronic inflammatory bowel condition for a decade but she avoided going to the doctors.
She had had some tests at the age of 26 after losing a lot of blood. She wasn't keen but her mother insisted she should go to the doctors and she did, where they gave her a blood test.
Whilst filming for the hit show, she missed several calls from her father who had said that her blood was "so low" and doctors had advised her to go to accident and emergency immediately.
Speaking on podcast Bedside Manners with Dr Oscar Duke, she said: "I went to the hospital. I had to have all of these checks and these iron infusions and that was where it started."
Chloe also explained how she first discovered the symptoms of ulcerative colitis when she was 16 but didn't do anything about it.
"I went to a college where I boarded when I was 16. I was staying away from home and I was living in a student house and there was blood down the toilet. I remember I told my mum and I was like, there's quite a lot of blood down the toilet," she said.
"I'm not really sure what's going on. She was of course like, go to the doctors. I went to the doctors, and they said that I would have to have a colonoscopy, which is a camera into the bowel."
Chloe then said she hadn't been to the hospital a lot and was "never sick" so she never went to the appointment as she was terrified.
"The doctor referred me and I got this letter, and this is awful, but I got this letter and I just never went to the appointment because I was terrified. Then I ignored it and what would happen, which is what I realise now, is that I can go into remission, I can go into a flare-up in remission. It would stop for periods of time so that the blood would go away," she said.
"I'd be like, 'Oh, cool, it's gone away, I'm better. There's nothing wrong with me'. I'd go through years where it wouldn't happen and then it would happen again, and then it would stop again. I would probably lie to my mum about how much it would happen because she always pestered me about it and I was like, 'No, it's fine.'"
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