A SOCIETY
leesha Verma is the Gutless Warrior – a voice for people with ostomy-related illnesses and inflammatory bowel disease. Her Instagram and Facebook pages tell of her experience of being diagnosed with colitis at the age of 17. Life for the alumna, a Health Studies and Social Work graduate who hails from Wolverhampton, changed irrevocably on New Year’s Eve 2014, when she was just 18 and studying for her A-levels. Instead of heading out with friends, she was rushed to a hospital operating theatre to undergo an emergency ileostomy, which left her with a stoma bag. “I had to take a year out as I was so poorly I couldn’t go to school,” she said. “When I came to the University, I didn’t tell anyone about the stoma because I was still trying to accept it myself and felt very conscious about it. As a consequence, I found my first year really hard.” It was during her first year of studies that Aleesha launched her Gutless Warrior Facebook and Instagram pages as a way of making sense of what she had experienced and to be a soundboard for anyone else needing someone to talk to who was going through the same.
18
LIFE MAGAZINE
SUMMER 2020
