Melissa Suffield has compared her life to a ‘sick joke’ as she explained despite taking steps to be healthy, she’s feeling sicker than ever amid her chronic illness battle.
The former EastEnders star, 31, was diagnosed with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) after feeling nauseous for months, with doctors struggling to find the cause.
And as a result she admitted she wasn’t ‘feeling very festive this year’ and won’t even get to indulge in a Christmas dinner.
Speaking to The Sun, Melissa said: ‘Last year I cooked a Christmas dinner and didn’t eat any of it. For me, I would say about 80% of the joy comes from all the food. So I’m not feeling very festive this year.’
She went on to explain how she had been at her healthiest this year, after making sure she only drank water and prepared all her food at home.
However, she said despite these measures, she’d ‘never been sicker’ and lamented that things were ‘very bleak’.
Melissa Suffield has compared her life to a ‘sick joke’ as she explained despite taking steps to be healthy, she’s feeling sicker than ever amid her chronic illness battle
The former EastEnders star, 31, was diagnosed with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) after feeling nauseous for months , with doctors struggling to find the cause
And as a result she admitted she wasn’t ‘feeling very festive this year’ and won’t even get to indulge in a Christmas dinner
Melissa said: ‘This is on paper, this year I’ve been healthier than I’ve been ever in my life before. I get an okay amount of sleep. I’ve got loads of like vitamins and minerals that my body needs going in, and I’ve never been sicker in my life.”
‘Have not had a drop of alcohol and like, look at the state of me! It’s just a bit of a sick joke, so like so healthy on paper, and so unhealthy in reality. It’s very bleak, I would say, quite bleak.’
Earlier this month, the body-positive star opened up on her ‘frustrating’ illness, which caused her to shed lots of pounds, but she insisted she ‘felt happier when bigger’.
Melissa – who played Lucy Beale in the BBC soap for six years until 2010 – got candid about how the chronic disease affects her on a daily basis, revealing she is now ‘less healthy’ than she was a year ago.
Admitting ‘nothing’ about the ‘frustrating’ condition has been through choice, she added that she currently wears her pre-pregnancy jeans.
‘But there’s no joy. I don’t enjoy the fact that that’s happened at all in the way that you know, that’s like a goal for a lot of people,’ she told The Sun.
‘It was never a goal for me. But B, this is the complete antithesis of whatever I’ve ever wanted with my body.’
The media personality admitted the chronic illness has significantly affected her skin and hair health.
She went on to explain how she had been at her healthiest this year, after making sure she only drank water and prepared all her food at home, but despite these measures, she’d ‘never been sicker’ and lamented that things were ‘very bleak’
Earlier this month, the body-positive star opened up on her ‘frustrating’ illness, which caused her to shed lots of pounds, but she insisted she ‘felt happier when bigger’
She added she has spent an ‘obscene amount of money on prescriptions’ and stressed to raise awareness that ‘thinner doesn’t mean you’re healthier’ – a concept she frequently raised on her social media platforms as well (pictured after weight loss)
‘What it [losing weight because of SIBO] has helped me do is prove the point that I’ve always, always made, which is that you cannot define how healthy someone is, by how much they weigh, or how fat you think they look or whatever it is that you think you know,’ she said.
The mother-of-one remarked she is ‘more of a burden on the NHS’ at the present moment, than when she ‘was bigger last year’.
She didn’t shy away from detailing the gruelling commutes to the hospital and reaching 40 GP visits only within this year, while being ‘bounced around from this department to this department’.
The former actress bluntly added she has spent an ‘obscene amount of money on prescriptions’ and stressed to raise awareness that ‘thinner doesn’t mean you’re healthier’ – a concept she frequently raised on her social media platforms as well.
Earlier in July this year, Melissa issued a health update after undergoing an ‘endoscopy’ for her – at the time – mystery illness.
At the time, she explained she had had her B12 iron appointment and her first NHS gastro appointment.
In a post to her Instagram, she said: ‘So I went to Dr Cline at the Cambridge Iron clinic because he is kind of the only doctor I could find who would deal with B12.’
Melissa revealed she reached 40 GP visits only within this year, while being ‘bounced around from this department to this department’
‘So basically with B12, brief science lesson from someone who’s not scientific, with B12 if your level is low, it can affect all f****ng parts of your body.’
‘The symptoms you can get with low B12, are normally like low energy, tingling, numbness, and things like that but I didn’t really have those.’
She also admitted that many other symptoms can indicate low B12 including fatigue, dizziness, headaches and nausea.
She said: ‘So many other symptoms like fatigue, dizziness, headaches, nausea, all of mine are gut issues, so really it can be at the at the root of a lot of other things.’
She also confessed that her levels were rather low, however, her initial GP didn’t believe it was ‘low enough’
She said: ‘Anyway when mine (B12 levels) was checked in January, my level was 146, this is low, but because it wasn’t quite low enough, which is 145, out of a scale of 145 up to 914 so pretty a big f****g scale.
‘I was one point over, but I was told I was normal because I was in that normal range.
‘I didn’t think anything of it, I kind of pushed because it was a bit low and they went yeah we’ll just give you some oral tablets.’
‘However, if your body is not absorbing B12, then oral tablets will do s**t all for you, it will just sit in your blood and you will wee them out, you need to be absorbing B12.’
Previously, Melissa revealed that she lost an unhealthy amount of weight in a very short amount of time due to the mystery illness (left after and right before)
She shared her health woes with fans and told how she has felt like ‘pure s**t’ and nauseous for months
Claiming she went to see a doctor named Dr Cline, Melissa revealed he said: ‘There’s a very strong chance that you have low B12, maybe not all your life, but certainly for a while.’
She then shared that she had an iron infusion which left her with a ‘fu***ng whopper of a bruise’.
However, she admitted: ‘(It) happens to me a lot when I have cannula so I was expecting that, but maybe not as dark as that but I was expecting it, so not a problem, and he said that will last about two years.’
Melissa then moved on to her gastro appointment and laughed as she said ‘As we all know I was rejected from NHS gastro, I put a referral in March, after my endoscopy came back, and the referral was rejected the next day.’
She then admitted she was not contacted by any healthcare professional to tell her it had been rejected.
She said: ‘However, nobody told me, or even my GP’s, not one of them.’
‘So we was sitting waiting for this referral date to come through, and I’m kind of chasing it and people are going “You’re not in the system”, so I was like hmm this doesn’t sound right.’
‘So I called my local hospital and I found out the name of the woman for the gastro department, and I asked to be put through directly to her.’
Melissa then revealed her anger once she found out her referral had been rejected.
She revealed: ‘She basically said yeah you don’t have a referral, so I put in a complaint and basically said there’s absolutely no f****ng way that this referral should have been rejected.’
‘Because their reason for rejecting it is that I had a clear ultrasound and upper endoscopy down my throat.’
‘And because it was clear, it couldn’t possibly be a gastro issue, and I was like “that’s f****ng bullshit because there are countless other things that I could have that match my symptoms which you would never diagnose on either one of those imaging tests.’
‘Anyway in doing this (putting in several complaints) somewhere down the line, my referral came through.’
Melissa then shared that she is now hoping to get a gastroparesis test to outline any other gut issues.
She said: ‘Gastroparesis is one of the things I want them to investigate.’
