Today TTTP client Julie Hopkins appears in The Sun newspaper, where she tells her heart breaking story of how osteoporosis is blighting her and her teenage daughter’s life.
A few years ago Julie, 42, was healthy and had an active lifestyle. So when she started suffering back pain at the age of 27 she put it down to the fact she’d given birth to her second child a few months later.
But Julie was incredibly shocked when an X-ray showed she had crushed vertebrae and was in fact suffering from osteoporosis – a disease more common in the elderly.
For the past 15 years Julie has watched helpless as the disease ravages her body. She has lost three inches in height from curvature of the spine, her teeth are crumbling and scans reveal she has the bones of a 90-year-old woman.
But for the mum-of-two her biggest fear was always that her teenage daughters Jade, 18, and Jasmine, 15, may suffer the same fate, which can be hereditary and is not always due to lifestyle factors.
Now these fears have been realised as Jasmine has been diagnosed with the condition at the age of just 15. Jasmine is already in pain and her dreams of becoming a street dancer may now be in tatters.
Julie contacted Talk to the Press because she wanted to raise awareness of this debilitating disease and we were able to place her story in The Sun’s health pages. She says: ‘Thank you so much for getting my story into print’.
