Ella Mills

Ella Mills

Ella Mills spent most of a year in bed, taking 25 medications a day

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Ella Mills was twenty and halfway through university when she became ill. She was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome — PoTS — along with other conditions affecting her autonomic nervous system, the part of the body that runs the things nobody thinks about: heart rate, blood pressure, digestion. What it meant day to day was that standing up was hard. She describes her heart rate climbing to between 150 and 180 beats a minute when she stood, while her blood pressure fell, leaving her too dizzy to move. Around that came chronic fatigue, brain fog, IBS, acid reflux and other digestive problems, repeated infections, headaches, pain across her body, and a growing sense of depression and anxiety. She spent most of the following year in bed or unable to leave the house. At the peak she was taking twenty-five different medications a day, and says none of them made a difference she could feel. In May 2012 she changed what she ate, and started writing about it. The blog became Deliciously Ella and then a food company. Her health, she says, stabilised, and she has been off medication for more than eight years. That is her account, in the order she tells it, and this page does not go further than that. Nothing here is medical advice, and none of it is evidence that changing a diet treats PoTS. The NHS says PoTS has no cure and is managed rather than fixed — more fluid, smaller meals with less carbohydrate, compression clothing, and for some people medicines, worked out with a GP. Anyone thinking about stopping a medicine they have been prescribed should speak to the doctor who prescribed it.

• Postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS)