Shannon Dunbar-Dawe, 30, was diagnosed with stomach paralysis after spending months ‘hunched over the toilet’ in pain with sickness – and now has a feeding tube
A woman who used to described herself as a “massive foodie” has revealed she lost half of her body weight due to a rare condition which prevents her from eating.
Shannon Dunbar-Dawe, 30, suddenly developed bloating and nausea in May 2022 and initially thought it was caused by drinking too much coffee. However, she later discovered she had stomach paralysis – a condition that occurs when the muscles in the stomach don’t move food as they should for it to be digested.
The former accounting student, from Glasgow, said she spent months “hunched over the toilet” in pain with sickness and was unable to eat more than a couple of digestive biscuits daily without looking “six months pregnant” due to stomach swelling. She claimed doctors dismissed her symptoms as “anxiety” or an “eating disorder” and put her in hospital in July 2023 where she was force-fed during the “worst two weeks of her life.”
She then consulted a private doctor who diagnosed her with gastroparesis. Now has had a feeding tube fitted as that is the only way she can consume food. The woman said she is a “shell” of who she used to be weighing only 5.6st. Her sister Charelle Dunbar-Dawe, 31, set up a GoFundMe to enable Shannon to get a gastric pacemaker to better her quality of life and allow her to one day have her feeding tube removed.
Shannon said: “It was really scary. I just woke up one day and never felt well again. It started off with a lot of nausea and feeling really, really full after having even a couple of bites of food. I had pain and this horrible burning in my stomach. I had a lot of bloating as well. I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I’ve had issues with acid reflux before so I thought it might be something to do with that.
“It was directly in my stomach, kind of my sternum area. Whenever I tried to eat anything the nausea would just be awful my stomach would swell up. I’d look six months pregnant. The swelling was that bad. I could eat literally one bite of food and it would feel like I’d eaten an entire buffet.
“My diet was pretty consistent at the time. I thought maybe I’d had too much coffee. That I’d upset my stomach with excess caffeine or something. But it was a completely new sensation to me so I didn’t really have any idea what was going on.
“Before it all started I weighed 64kg. I was a healthy size 10 to 12. I loved my food, I was a massive foodie. I was always stuffing my face. Within six months I had dropped to 40kg.” The food-lover spent 10 days in hospital after her pain became “unbearable” but was sent away with no answers, Glasgow Live reported.
She was forced to quit her accountancy studies and endure months “hunched over the toilet” as she was constantly nauseous which led to severe weight loss. Shannon said: “It got to a point where the pain was unbearable and I went to accident and emergency. They gave me morphine for the pain which didn’t help at all and acid reducers which also didn’t help. They admitted me to the hospital.
“They initially said they thought I had gastritis, inflammation of the stomach. But they didn’t do any tests to have a look down there so they were just going off what information they had. I spent 10 days in the hospital in a short space of time. I didn’t eat anything the entire time I was in the hospital. It was horrendous.
“They told me they’d arrange an endoscopy in the coming months and that was it. I was just sent home. I spent from morning until night in the bathroom hunched over the toilet because I just felt so sick. I would take my laptop to the bathroom and just watch stuff and sit there. That was my life for months.
“I had to discontinue my studies because I had no brain power from having no food and very limited food intake.” When her symptoms continued to worsen, she was referred to a gastroenterologist in May 2023, but claims she was misdiagnosed with an eating disorder. Two months later, in July 2023, Shannon said she was “relieved” to finally be diagnosed with stomach paralysis.
Shannon also wants to spread awareness of her rare condition to ensure people get diagnosed quicker. She said: “Raising awareness is something that is really important to me. There will be so many people out there with my symptoms who might never get an answer because gastroparesis is quite a rare thing.
“The amount of times that I’ve come across cases of young women being told ‘it’s all in your head, it’s anorexia’ and being diagnosed with eating disorders or IBS because they refuse to do proper testing and actually get to the root of why these women are having stomach issues. It’s horrendous. My advice to anyone who is suffering from ongoing nausea and vomiting and stomach pains is to push for a gastric emptying test because if it comes back negative, great that’s something to rule out. If it comes back positive then the earlier you catch symptoms and can intervene the better.”
A spokesperson for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: “This patient has raised her concerns through our complaints process. Though we are unable to comment on individual patient cases due to confidentiality, we are sorry we were unable to meet her expectations. At all times the patient’s concerns were taken seriously by the clinicians involved, and attempts were made to resolve them.”
You can donate to Shannon’s fundraiser, which has a target of £50,000, here.