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When I was a teenager, I suffered with poor mental health, and I was self-harming. I was seen by CAMHS, the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service, and it was a psychiatrist there who asked me about health conditions that were in my family.

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She found that my ferritin was way over what it should have been, and she told me I had something called haemochromatosis. I was just 14 years old.

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I was so young and didn’t really know how to speak for myself. The hematologists were telling me, ‘I’m sure things aren’t so bad for you, you’re young.’ I just kept screaming over and over again, that’s not the case; I feel like I can’t get up for school. I’d come out of appointments almost in tears because nobody was taking me seriously.

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Everything I do feels like I’m wading through really thick mud. It's sore, it’s heavy, it’s hard. It can be quite dark at times, because I look at people my age doing things that I would love to be doing.  

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I’ve always said that this is not an old person’s condition; I am proof in front of you that it’s not.  

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