St. Brenden’s High School senior Bianca Hernandez had a personal health problem but has used the experience to help others. She was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in August 2015.
“I was not having any pain, just bloody stools,” she says.
They did extensive testing but couldn’t find a cause until they did a colonoscopy and endoscopy and found extensive inflammation.
They put Hernandez on low doses of steroids which helped. She’s now in remission.
Hernandez is one of the 1.5 million people who have Inflammatory Bowel Disease. She says each year 70,000 individuals are diagnosed with this disease. Statistics indicate 52 percent of patients diagnosed with IBD are diagnosed between the ages of 5-18.
Going to the bathroom at school is tough enough for students, but combine the ordinary issues of going to the bathroom with the potential loss of control of your bowels and the potential is there for embarrassing accidents.
“This is a serious issue,” she says. “This is nothing to mess around with. That happened to me a few times. That’s why I believe this is important. I don’t have control. My body doesn’t have control.”
Her experiences with trying to go to school with the disease led her to create the Go Free Program to raise awareness about the problem of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. The goal is to educate schools about IBD and help create policies to make it easier for those children to go to school.
“It can be embarrassing and it takes a toll on students,” she says. “Go Free helps them focus on the fact that you can carry on with your life. You have a private little bubble.”
Right now Go Free has reached 15 schools, including some elementary schools, private, public and Jesuit schools. The schools have a packet with information and different resources.
She’s been meeting with administrators and counselors at different school to make them aware of the IBD issues.
“Just to further educate about how much of a toll this takes on a patient’s health,” she says. “One of the biggest factors, and triggers, is stress. Stress plays a key role in making a patient’s condition worse.”
She also talks to psychologists about this.
“IBD is a lifelong disease,” she says. “Go Free makes it easier to know, this is going to be okay.”
Hernandez was lucky enough to have a caring administration at St. Brenden’s. She was given the option of using a faculty bathroom which made her life much easier.
“I go to the restroom on the average of seven to eight times a day,” she says. “I have to schedule my day around where do I go to the bathroom.”
But not everyone has that support at school.
“I talked to friends who had IDS who did not have the option of using the private restroom,” she says. “In April 2016 I started the program.
Then I started meeting with schools.”
Her goal is to reach as many schools as possible.
“My goal is start in my community, then reaching out outside of Florida,” she says.
She not only meets with schools, but she reaches out to other IBD students and sends care packages filled with useful products to those who contact her.
Despite IBD, Hernandez remained active in school. She was involved in drama club, the Science Honor Society, the youth group at school and campus ministry.
“Prior to my diagnosis, I was playing volleyball competitively,” she says. “I needed to stop to focus on my health.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
