“I was a stereotype. My upbringing was poor. I had a broken family and an absent father. My mom was on social assistance. I didn’t have any healthy role models in my life. Some people might draw a straight line from my birth to the day I first took my clothes off for money, like it was inevitable.”

“When I first became ill in 2008, no one believed me. My family doctor told me that all of my tests had come back normal. He said the only possible cause of my neurological disability and gastrointestinal symptoms was a trauma from childhood. He said what I had was a psychosomatic disorder.”