That honesty doesn’t mean Turner hasn’t had her share of embarrassing moments. “I remember I was dating this girl and I didn’t know at that point what foods I could and couldn’t tolerate. I was on the Tube with her playing it chill and was suddenly like, ‘I’m going to throw up and poop myself,’” she says. “I didn’t know what to do, so I ran out of the Tube and left her! I never saw her again!”
‘I turned into someone different after my diagnosis.’
When Catriona Mill’s long-term relationship ended after 10 years, she could pinpoint the exact moment things started to go bad: when she was diagnosed with UC five years prior. “I completely changed over the course of being diagnosed with a chronic condition,” says the mother of two, who lives in Scotland. “I wasn’t able to be as fun and carefree as I once was, and I was irritable, always exhausted, dealing with persistent pain, and anxious about what would happen next.”
It wasn’t that her partner didn’t support her. “He handled it well, but it was an unfair weight to ask for him to carry,” she says. “Having UC is like having a full-time job that nobody else can work and you can’t quit it. He coped well, but it was a difficult situation.” Making things tougher was that their communication started to break down. “I didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with anyone else—I became very egocentric, and my world got so small,” she says. “My partner didn’t want to come to me with what was going on in his life because he didn’t want to make my stress—and, therefore, my symptoms—worse.”
On top of that, their sex life began to change. “While our intimacy remained strong, I found that chronic illness affected my ability to fully experience pleasure, including reaching orgasm,” Mill says. “There’s the emotional stress of living with the disease and also the biological impact. If you’re worried about releasing a bowel movement, you can’t relax enough to actually have the orgasm.” While they both tried to keep the relationship going, four years after her diagnosis, they split up.
