My Diagnosis wit ATAKAN UZUN talks about the struggles he faced as a secondary school student, culminating on the 12th of May 2017 with the diagnosis of a rare disease.
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s a young teenager, I struggled with fatigue every day, even in the morning, and I would frequently fall asleep. I would often fall asleep at home around 9pm. I also had a tough childhood, getting constant stomach bugs and missing lots of school. As I finished primary school, things began to worsen as I began to develop into puberty (we found out after my eventual diagnosis that my condition meant I had never really hit puberty). In secondary school, my condition gradually became even worse, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. During the summer of 2016, I started vomiting quite a lot every time I ate dinner. I decided to go to the doctor to get a blood test. The blood results came back with a diagnosis of lactose intolerance. I would have to stay away from all dairy products which included lactose for a few months, to see
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if that solved my health issues. I decided to go back to South Doc in November 2016, because I was also suffering from a stomach bug. After the doctor in South Doc tested me, he concluded with one interesting point. He said he didn’t think I was lactose intolerant and that he believed there was something underlying my symptoms that he couldn’t get to the bottom of. A few weeks later, I went back to my own doctor and he referred me to the Mercy Hospital to get tested for tuberculosis (TB). This test also came back clear. Despite countless blood tests, we still didn’t know what was wrong with me. Because of all of this, I had missed around four weeks of school. It was clear that I was already falling behind with my academic work. Despite this, I still did well in my Christmas exams. Then came the most crucial year of my life, 2017. I managed to not miss any school in January, but I missed some in February because of a head cold and a chesty cough. When I came back, I was not operating anywhere near a level good enough to pay attention to my academic
work, and to pay attention in class. At this time, I started to vomit after eating again. Due to this, I began to stop eating my breakfast and the deputy principal used to ask me every morning why I wasn’t eating. A dilemma I had was that if I went long periods without eating, I would vomit bile. This happened one day in April 2017, during a family trip to Fota Wildlife Park. As April came to a close, the most critical month of my life approached. It was in the first few weeks of this month that I began to finally figure out what was wrong with me. The 5th of May 2017 was meant to have been the day I went into the city library to start my Leaving Cert History project. Instead, I went to the doctor in order to get yet another blood test. On my way there, my vision blurred, and I began to vomit on Washington Street. I couldn’t prevent myself from vomiting further and almost fell to the ground as I was so low in energy, but I managed to get to the doctor. I was so underweight that the doctor had to turn me on my side to get blood out of me. I was told that I was naturally
