Today I thought I’d revisit an old topic here on the blog and that is moving abroad. If you don’t know, I used to live in China where I worked as a teacher. It’s something I get asked about a lot so wanted to create a blog post about the reality of living with a chronic illness and living in a foreign country.
If you’re a regular reader around here you’ll know that when I moved abroad, I hadn’t actually been diagnosed with Crohn’s at this point. As I talked about in my misdiagnosis journey blog post, I wasn’t diagnosed until my second year of living abroad but I stayed their for a further two years before coming home to England.
Preparing to move abroad
So firstly, I often get asked about moving abroad and how we prepared for it. We found out I had the job in May and then moved in August-crazy! So we didn’t have much time to prepare. Because we didn’t know how it would work out at first; we used a storage company to store lots of things (such as Now Storage self-storage in Reading) and limited ourselves to one suitcase each at first. This made it feel as if we could come back at any time although we did eventually take our stuff out of storage the following year as we began to put down roots. We were lucky we didn’t have many major ties-we sold our cars easier enough and we had a base to come back to at my parents should we have needed it. My organisation helped us with things like visas and flights.
Being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease abroad
After a whirlwind first year, I was then diagnosed with Crohn’s disease the following December. This was a really tough time for me as I spent time in hospital by myself; away from family and friends. I had to make the decision whether to stay abroad or go home and I eventually decided to stay. One of they key things in making this decision is I felt I needed to try to understand what it was to live with this condition and having private health insurance through my company really helped.
My tips for living abroad with Crohn’s disease
We stayed for another 1.5 years and managed to travel around Asia during this time too. So living abroad with IBD is possible. Of course, the biggest consideration is health insurance. Remicade (which I took at the time) is EXPENSIVE and there is no way I would have been able to afford it without insurance. Of course, this is a mute point in some countries with universal healthcare systems but most do not and it is worth considering. If you are not on expensive medication then this might not be an issue but what if you get into a flare-up? or require surgery and are not fit to fly?
My next tip is you need to either speak the language or have somebody who can help you. Google translate may not help with things like accurately describing your symptoms. I was lucky to be treated in a hospital with English-speaking doctors as Mandarin is a very difficult language to learn Do some research into local hospitals-do they have translation facilities or English-speaking doctors? Are the hospitals easy to access? Do they have specialists in IBD? This was tricky for me at first because IBD is not very common in China.
Another consideration with living abroad with IBD is your employer. In the UK, a long-term condition is classed as a disability that your employer needs to make reasonable adjustments for but it may not be the case in where you move to. Speak to people living there if you can or, if you have a job lined up, current employees. Can they accomodate your condition? Is there sick pay? What would happen if you needed a long period of time off for sickness?
And finally, consider the support network you will have. I don’t regret moving abroad but found the first year incredible tough without my parents. As I said IBD was rare in China so I only made connections online. I think meeting people in person who were going through it would have massively helped too.
Living abroad is possible with a chronic condition and you shouldn’t feel as if IBD will stop you from doing what you love. But you will need careful planning, lots of research and an understanding employer to make it happen.
