It was like any other day. She woke up, freshened up, and reached for a simple breakfast — a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk. But before she could realize, the ordinary morning turned into something else. Just as she finished her bowl, she vomited. She blamed it on the milk. “Perhaps it could be the soured milk,” she told herself.
For Emilie Cullum, a 36-year-old mother of three from St Albans, Hertfordshire, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation at the time. But the sickness got worse. What followed was a 10-day spiral of unexplained sickness that no amount of blame could explain away. And after three months of misdiagnosis that nearly cost her everything, she found out that she has a rare illness that is slowly starving her to death.
Vomiting Followed by Misdiagnosis
When the sickness continued for over 10 days, Cullum knew it wasn’t the soured milk. She struggled to keep her meals down. “I ate breakfast and was really sick but didn't feel ill, didn't have a temperature or anything like that, so I thought maybe the milk was off, then had dinner and was sick again. Because I had been so violently sick for days, I thought then I had broken my rib being sick,” she told The Daily Mail.
As the illness worsened, she visited A&E. The doctors handed her a diagnosis: Crohn's disease. Crohn's disease is a chronic disease where abnormal reactions of the immune system cause inflammation in the digestive tract. It is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that can lead to sickness and nausea. It was plausible and treatable. But it was also catastrophically wrong! For three months, she lived with the symptoms. She couldn't eat. Each meal became a gamble. She couldn’t eat with her family. The weight loss was drastic, and no diet or illness could explain it.
When the symptoms continued to prevent her from living her life, she booked a private consultation with a specialist in February 2025.
The Real Diagnosis
The doctors soon diagnosed her condition. She had gastroparesis — a rare condition in which the stomach cannot empty food properly, causing it to pass through the digestive system far more slowly than normal. It is a rare condition; about 14 in every 100,000 Britons suffer from some form of the condition. This condition can make the patient feel bloated and full after a few bites of a meal, doubled over with stomach pain.
Cullum has now been told that she has less than a year to live, and she says, “the thought of having to leave my children is horrific and unthinkable.”
The specialist told her that the pain was coming from her abdomen, where gastroparesis takes hold because the nerves responsible for telling the stomach to empty are not as effective. In her case, a mother of three, it meant her ‘stomach is completely broken’ and that ‘nothing is going through’. She feels full all the time and cannot keep food down, which has led to her rapid weight loss.
“It was fine because I just thought they could fix it but then I was losing more and more weight and people were commenting. While I was in hospital they scanned me and they said if I don't get some weight on me, essentially I'm 'forced' anorexic, so I probably haven't got much longer than a year,” she said.
Cullum has managed to gain some weight to just over 5 stone after undergoing a jejunostomy, a procedure that allows feeding directly into the small intestine through a tube. Despite this, she is ‘critically underweight’, as her friend mentioned in the GoFundMe, launched to help raise £200,000 for private total parenteral nutrition (TPN) treatment, which would deliver nutrients directly into her bloodstream.
“She can come home with a private nurse meaning she gets to be with her family, most importantly her young children as they struggle through their GCSEs because their mother is starving to death. Her life expectancy is going to be considerably shorter if she can't have this done, so this is her last hope to be around for as long as possible for her gorgeous children,” the fundraiser reads.
She should reach 6 stone 9 pounds in order to be qualified for the treatment. She is currently in residential hospital care, where she receives fluids, nutrition, and medication directly into her veins through a Hickman line and a PICC line.
Her husband, Kyle, 41, is a golf teacher.
“It's hard, the children are growing up, and we thought we were going to have all these years, we did it young, and it's just not worked out that way. I don't want to go to the hospital knowing that I don't have that much time left and not spending it with my family. I have been in hospital for pretty much a year, it is quite mentally hard to sit on a ward,” Cullum said.
