I follow molecules
beyond the flask.

I have lived with eosinophilic disease for years, through repeated attacks, treatment and interrupted studies.

My experience since 2011

I was a teenager when persistent gastrointestinal illness began affecting my life in 2011. Recurrent vomiting and other difficult symptoms were followed by years of medical investigations and treatment. My history has included eosinophilic gastroenteritis and evaluation of a wider hypereosinophilic picture. It took a toll on ordinary routines, and at times on my education, examinations, and research.

I lived with the burdens of prolonged glucocorticoid treatment, and later found greater stability with a six-food elimination diet. I am not presenting my experience as a model for anyone else's treatment, or claiming that the condition has been cured. It has taught me how far the language of a clinical diagnosis can be from the uncertainty a patient lives with.

The life between diagnoses

I finished high school at sixteen. My father had died, and I had spent a substantial part of my final school year in hospital. I graduated, but the examination results were insufficient for medical school, which was where I wanted to go. I had already become acquainted with medicine from the patient's side, and I had no wish to give up the other side of the consultation desk.

Some attacks became so severe that I could not keep down even water. They disrupted ordinary life and university study in ways an academic record alone cannot convey. Living through them also taught me how much can remain outside a laboratory measurement.

Severe flares sometimes required urgent investigation and treatment, even when important commitments were approaching. Prolonged treatment brought complications of its own. I describe those episodes in the fuller personal account rather than in this academic overview.

When an experience became scholarship

In 2022, the questions raised by that experience helped inspire two chapters I wrote with colleagues about autoimmune diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. The first covered etiology and pathophysiology; the second examined diagnostics and treatments. These were reviews of the scientific literature, not reports of my own illness. Eosinophilic gastrointestinal disease is not necessarily autoimmune, and I do not equate the two. The chapters are one part of my wider scientific work, but they have particular personal significance.