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A brave 23-year-old who suffers from a chronic bowel condition and has to wear a colostomy bag claims she was humiliated by another woman when she was swimming.

Jade Hughes was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when she was just 17 and spent her days rushing to the toilet, where she could spend hours doubled over in agony.

After years of waking up in the middle of the night in agonising pain and being prescribed different medications she made the drastic decision earlier this year to go ahead with major surgery and have her large bowel removed.

This was replaced with a pouch, known as an ileostomy bag.

But as she hoped the bag would give her a new lease of life to exercise again, and release her from pain, she found she was criticised merely for swimming.

Speaking exclusively to Mirror.co.uk, Jade, from Tiverton, Devon, said: "The operation has completely changed my life - I used to carry around a change of clothes, a bucket and wet wipes everywhere I went.

"But the bag has given me my life back and one of the first things I wanted to do was to get a membership at my local leisure centre so I could start putting some weight on as I'd dropped to five and a half stone."

The sales assistant started going swimming as a way of building up her weight and becoming healthier.

She was beginning to see the benefits of being able to be active again, but was left stunned when she claims another woman told her she shouldn't be in the water.

Jade said: “I was in the pool and this woman, who must’ve been in her 50s, came over to me and said ‘do you think that’s appropriate for the pool?’, pointing towards my bag.

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“I think I was just stunned so I didn't reply and then she said, ‘well you know that shouldn’t be on show in pool? It’s not very nice for young children to see’.”

“She then went off to get the lifeguard, who came over and told me, ‘I’m sorry I have to say something because we’ve had a complaint.'

"But she was really nice and said 'don’t take any notice and just go about your swim as you were’.

“I stayed in a little bit longer but it started to get really uncomfortable because the woman kept swimming past and tutting at me."

Jade says she had deliberately been going to the pool early as it's the school holidays and it gets busier in the afternoons, and believes there were only two children in the 'baby pool' with their dad at the time.

She added: "I usually wear high-waisted bottoms but as I had been going everyday my other pairs were in the wash."

However Jade remains determined, and said she hasn't let the incident put her off going swimming despite being hurt by the woman's comments.

"That lady has no idea what I've been through for the last seven years," she said.

"Luckily for me I love my bag and I love my body. It looks after me everyday, it fights infection it keeps my heart racing and my blood pumping.

"So whatever anyone may think of me it will never affect me."

Jade, who got married to her partner Will last year, explained that she has had to deal with several "accidents" where she hasn't been able to make the toilet, as well as days of endless agony with her condition.

“I just started feeling really sick at college and would need the toilet suddenly but wouldn’t have any time to make it.

“I left it for a couple of weeks thinking it was just a bug but it just seemed to get worse.

“It was difficult at work too - I had a Saturday job and I would call in sick but being a 17-year-old girl I think they thought I was pulling sickies because I didn’t want to come in.

“This went on for a couple of weeks before I went to the doctor, who thought it might have been a bug from something I'd eaten on holiday - but I hadn’t been away for about six months.

“At first I was made to starve myself for a week and he said come back if I still had the same symptoms, which I did, and when I went back he said I had gastroenteritis, so I was given diarrhoea tablets.

“By this point I’d missed four weeks of college and lost a stone and a half, but then I started passing blood and was in agony.

“My mum took me to the doctors again and I was being palmed off so she called my dad who came up and refused to leave until something was done.”

Jade was then seen by another GP who advised that she was immediately taken by ambulance to hospital, where she was seen by a specialist.

“My mum was so upset and she must’ve looked up my symptoms online and said to me that I needed to prepare myself for something serious because it might be bowel cancer.

“I was 17 and thinking ‘I’m going to die’. A few weeks ago I’d been at college enjoying myself and there I was lying in a hospital bed thinking I’m dying.”

She said that doctors tried to carry out a colonoscopy, which involves using a thin flexible tube to examine the colon and find ulcers and tumours. But her bowel was too inflamed.

“The ulcers were so horrific and they didn’t want to damage it,” she added.

“Later on a lady doctor came in my room and told me I had ulcerative colitis and I had no idea what it was, so I was like ‘I’ve got a disease? Where did I catch that from?’

“And my mum just looked at me really disappointedly because she was thinking it was some sort of sexually transmitted infection.”

The doctor then explained that though it was a form of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) it wasn’t infectious.

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic condition, which causes inflammation of the inner lining of the rectum and colon, where tiny ulcers develop on the surface.

Doctors don’t know what causes it and at the moment there isn’t a cure so symptoms can only be controlled with medication, or surgery in some extreme cases like Jade's.

Jade was put on various medications, including steroids to take the inflammation down, which would work for a short while before her symptoms would worsen again.

She spent years in and out of hospital, often being drip fed as her weight plummeted, and on one occasion even needing oxygen after a bad reaction to medication.

“I had to drop out of college - it ruined everything.

“I also had to try and explain to my boss in Tesco about my condition and it was probably the most embarrassing thing of all.

“He was an older man and I was a young girl telling him that I couldn’t control when I needed the toilet.”

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Jade battled for nearly six years with different tablets on varying dosages and said doctors were running out of things to do.

She said: “Last year they said to me there was one more thing I could try - injections twice a week - but they just weren’t as effective as the tablets.”

The final straw for Jade was when medics said they were going to try her on a placebo medication to ‘see if it was in her head’.

“I said to them, ‘I’m at the stage where no medication you can give me will ever improve anything’.

“I then changed my doctor and he was great, he said to me that he didn’t want to see me suffering anymore.”

She was given another round of steroids before he asked her if she had considered surgery - as a very last option.

(Image: www.photolesk.co.uk)

“Will and I had been talking about it for a long time before then and I would ask him what he would think if I had a bag, because it’s not the most attractive thing.

“He was like, ‘you’ve lost so much weight’ - I was five and a half stone and wearing children’s bras - and agreed I should go ahead with it.

“So earlier this year I called the hospital and spoke to a nurse and just told her I couldn’t go on any longer, I wanted the operation.

“Within a few days I had a meeting with the surgeon about what the operation would entail and how the bag would work and before I knew it, a few weeks later, I had the surgery.”

(Image: www.photolesk.co.uk)

Jade's operation, carried out on May 5 this year, involved removing her entire large intestine before the end of her small intestine is brought out through an opening in the wall of her abdomen.

An external bag, known as an ileostomy or stoma, is fitted onto the opening to collect the waste, which is emptied and changed when necessary.

“I nearly passed out when I saw the stoma the first time.

“I asked my husband if he wanted to watch me change it and he was saying ‘you’re doing really well’, and then the next thing he nearly fainted."

(Image: www.photolesk.co.uk)

She added: “The bag is like my permanent toilet - and the surgery can be reversed if I want it to somewhere down the line.

“I need to have a second operation to have my rectum removed because that still gets affected by ulcers, but the surgeons say they don’t want to do that just yet as it can affect my chances of having children in the future - so I will need to have that operation when I’m ready.”

She continued: “It’s changed my life so much in the three months since the operation, it’s mental.

“We went to Total Wipeout recently, that’s something I would never have been able to do before.

"Even going for a walk I would need to take a change of clothes, a bucket and some wet wipes just in case."

Jade believes the support of her family and her husband Will, 24, has helped her get through her journey with UC.

“Will has had to deal with so much but he’s been so supportive. He’s just amazing.

“The amount of times we’ve been out in public and he’s had to pull over so I could go to the toilet in a field.

“The pain you get with it is really bad and you can wake up in the middle of the night screaming in pain and he would be there for me.”

Jade uses social media to document her recovery and inspire other girls not to be ashamed of their bodies.

She adds:"People will always judge you, always drag you down when your starting to feel really good about yourself.

"Ladies love your body!! Fat, thin, scars, stretch marks, SH*T BAGS! Love your fricken body!!!!! (sic)"