GCSEs, Crohn's and the loss of our Karla. What more can we deal with?

I've found that sitting exams is not the best way to try and keep your mind off of your illness.

GCSEs are hard at the best of times, never mind what the last three weeks has thrown at me. I've been physically ill, mentally drained and overall just under the weather. I've wanted to just pack it all up and run from everything but I knew, deep down, that wasn't the way to go around the situation.

The first week of exams wasn't as bad as I got told. I had three exams and they weren't too bad- AQA Biology wasn't the best exam that was sat, but the entire population of year 11s over the country would tell you that! The other two didn't shake my brain as much as I was expecting. The after math of the first week affected my second week pretty badly. I found that only having two days to recover isn't great for a Crohn's sufferer. I didn't want to wake up on the Monday. My body was having none of it.

To make the whole experience even better, we came back after a week off for half term to a line up of nine exams in the space of four days. On top of that, on Wednesday, we were made aware of the death of our good friend Karla due to brain cancer. We all knew the inevitable but it hit us all, the whole year, like a truck. We love her and miss her every second of everyday. Doing our exams on top of all this grief is painfully traumatizing I don't quite know how to feel about the whole situation.

Once the overall shock had settled in, I thought i was going to be alright with everything. I had my exams to focus on and tske my mind off of things but the pain kept coming back. I tried to ignore it and it just kept returning in all of it's hideous gloating. Should I want to hide it? Or should I accept the fact that this is life, and it hurts?