Gastroparesis Took Sarah Cresswell’s Meals. She Made Her IV Feed a Lesson.

The bag holds two litres. Sarah Cresswell hangs it, checks the line under her collarbone, and slides the whole thing into a small backpack, because, as she explains to the camera, “it has to be protected from the light.” It will run for 12 hours while she sleeps. In the morning she disconnects and gets on with her day. Her port cover has a Harry Potter design, “of course.” The caption on that video, posted on August 8, 2023, was the line that made her known: “I eat through my heart and im absolutely thriving!!”

Cresswell, who posts on TikTok as @nauseatedsarah, lives in the UK with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and gastroparesis, and is fed through a vein rather than her gut, a treatment called total parenteral nutrition, or TPN. She started it in 2022; her TPN anniversary falls in September, so this autumn marks four years. Gut Health Times read her videos, captions and writing at source to tell her story in her own words.

The story: Years of being told it was something else

Cresswell told the long version in a video posted on August 13, 2023, titled in her caption “This is my diagnosis story.” She wrote her own on-screen captions for it, and they begin plainly: “I have been unwell my whole life.” Food, she says, made her sick for as long as she can remember. Then comes the line that sums up the years that followed: “you know how some people live to eat / I was barely eating to live.”

In her early twenties, she says, she was in and out of hospital with unstable blood sugar, dehydration, abdominal pain and cyclical vomiting. In her account, doctors ran blood tests and endoscopies and “eventually sent me home with a misdiagnosis of an eating disorder.” Her answer was to read. “I decided to take things into my own hands,” she says, describing journal article after journal article until she came across Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a condition of the connective tissue, and then gastroparesis, which she describes as often found alongside it. It took, in her words, “a whole another year of hospital admissions” before a private rheumatology doctor diagnosed hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and a month later a gastroenterologist diagnosed gastroparesis after a gastric emptying scan.

At first she was fed through a nasojejunal tube, which runs through the nose past the stomach into the small intestine. She managed that way for a few years, she says, though not without side effects, from broken skin where the tube was taped to repeat endoscopies when it blocked. Then Covid arrived. “Covid ravaged my body in way I didn’t know it could be broken,” her captions read. She could not keep down medication, water or feed, and ended up in hospital with severe malnutrition. Her family, she says, had been preparing to say goodbye. Within 24 hours of a transfer to another hospital, she was put on TPN. “TPN saved my life,” she wrote.

The turn: She filmed the part most people never see

The video that made her name was a practical one. During home artificial nutrition awareness week in August 2023, she simply showed her evening set-up: the sterile routine, the Hickman line that “goes into my skin / under my collarbone / and over and into the top of my heart,” the bag that carries all the calories and fluid she needs, and the multivitamin she takes by mouth because the bag does not carry vitamins. She answered the two questions she is asked most. Is she still hungry? No, because her blood sugar stays stable. Does she miss eating? No. Then she adds: “my stomach is still rumbles / which I think is audacious.”

That video shows 16.5 million plays and 1.1 million likes on its TikTok page. Her diagnosis story, posted five days later, shows 1.8 million plays. She has called the treatment “a real blessing” and has never presented it as easy: the same video explains that she must stay sterile at all times because of the risk of sepsis. Within months she was telling the story on podcasts; two of those interviews, from Your story with Ella (October 9, 2023) and Christian Women In The UK (February 17, 2024), sit on her own link page.

On September 2, 2025, she marked three years on TPN with a thank-you video to her care team, her family, her church and her husband. She says that “when I lay in a hospital bed in the summer of 2022 approaching my final days I could never have imagined that life would look the way it does now,” according to TikTok’s transcript of the video. She also credits the account itself: “if I had never made that TikTok video 3 years ago I would never have got to meet some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.” The same video names a pyjama brand she has a paid partnership with; she labels it as such.

The science: What gastroparesis is, and why it travels with hypermobility

Gastroparesis is defined by the American College of Gastroenterology as symptoms of food staying in the stomach together with objective evidence of delayed gastric emptying, with no blockage at the stomach’s outlet (ACG Clinical Guideline, 2022). It is usually confirmed with a scan that tracks a test meal leaving the stomach, the same kind of gastric emptying scan Cresswell describes.

It is not common. A Mayo Clinic study of every resident of Olmsted County, Minnesota, found an age-adjusted prevalence of definite gastroparesis of 37.8 per 100,000 women and 9.6 per 100,000 men on January 1, 2007 (Jung et al., Gastroenterology, 2009). By our arithmetic, that is about four times as common in women, and roughly one woman in 2,600.

The link with hypermobility is real but still being worked out. A 2025 expert review for the American Gastroenterological Association says that in people with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and a common heart-rate disorder called POTS, “abnormal gastric emptying may be more common than in the general population,” and advises gastroenterologists to ask about joint hypermobility. It also says the evidence for the biological mechanism is “limited and evolving” (Aziz et al., Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 2025).

The ACG guideline covers diet, medicines, devices and procedures on the stomach outlet. TPN is for people whose gut cannot absorb enough nutrition, and it is run at home with training and specialist support. In the UK the patient charity PINNT supports people on home artificial nutrition and runs the awareness week, which in 2026 was August 3 to 9.

The work now: A slower feed, a dissertation and a garden of words

Her life on TPN has not stood still. In a video posted on August 14, 2025, she described a month-long flare and said the plan with her gastro team had been to come down to three nights a week of feed, adding that she had not “been able to eat as much as I had been previously.” In July 2026 she posted from the Cornish coast: “Master’s dissertation is due end of August, but this week I’m out of office.”

Her longer writing now lives on Patreon, under the name The Wild Becoming, which she opened on June 26, 2025. She introduces herself there as “a writer, Christian , and disabled woman living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, gastroparesis, and total parenteral nutrition (TPN),” and writes “about how faith looks when healing doesn’t come.” In her launch post she explains why: “I’ve always been able to better communicate in written word than spoken.” On TikTok she put the promise in one line: “It’s not about being fixed. It’s about being seen.”

Where to find her: TikTok at @nauseatedsarah, where the questions about TPN keep coming, and The Wild Becoming on Patreon for the writing.

How we checked this: Sources and method

We read Sarah Cresswell’s TikTok profile logged out on October 18, 2026 (101,400 followers, 1.5 million likes, 111 videos) and the pages of the videos quoted here, with their plays and dates. Quotes from the August 2023 videos come from the captions she added herself; quotes from the September 2025 and August 2025 videos come from TikTok’s automatic transcript and are labelled as such. We read her Patreon launch post and profile, her link page and the two podcast pages it links, which carry her full name. The science comes from PubMed records 35926490, 19249393 and 40387691, each matched by title. A Newsweek article from October 27, 2023 was used only as a cross-check of dates. We have not printed her age, hospitals, place of study or any discount codes. Gut Health Times has no relationship with Sarah Cresswell. This article is educational, describes what the cited sources say, and is not medical advice.