“While there is life, there is hope”. It is an optimistic message that Anna, a young woman of 30 from Sète, wanted to convey during her interview with Midi Libre. As she explains, Anna has Nutcracker syndrome, or nutcracker syndrome, whose various symptoms make it difficult to diagnose. Yet his suffering was very real, despite what some doctors were able to tell him who put his pain on the account of stress. According to our colleagues from Midi Libre, the nutcracker syndrome causes “excruciating pain throughout the abdomen, (…) pain in the left flank, blood in the urine, very painful periods, genital pain and digestive systems, pelvic varices and thromboses of the left leg”.
So many pains that have made Anna’s life a real obstacle course: “15 fucking years of medical wandering, 24 months of fierce struggle, 9 operating theatres, 4 major surgeries, 11 scars, 180 injections of ‘anticoagulants, more than 25 scanners in recent months, several hundred thousand euros and a lot of courage”. These pains are due to the fact that the renal vein of the sufferers is crushed between the superior mesenteric artery and the aorta, which leads to a change in the blood flow and causes the body to create other circulation paths which are located at the origin of various sufferings. But thanks to an article read by her father, Anna was finally able to get a lead that allowed her to see the appropriate specialist and, after half her life spent in pain, to be correctly diagnosed.
A disease that mainly affects women
By taking advantage of the international day of rare diseases, the young thirty-year-old wants to encourage all those who are suffering but who have not yet been diagnosed to keep hope. “I would like to insist on the fact that it is important to listen to each other, trust each other, and never give up. That’s what I did and it was this determination and this courage that allowed me to get out of it. (…) As long as there is life, there is hope”. Thanks to the support of her family and the visibility of a disease that affects between 200 and 300 people a year, the majority of whom are women, Anna was able to identify the disease that was eating away at her and continues to encourage all those in her case not to not give up.
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