‘I’ve had to have my heart restarted once, twice, or more’
07:07, 08 Mar 2026Updated 07:37, 08 Mar 2026
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
“I have moments where I feel like it’d be best if I put an end to everything, all the treatments. I live in hospital, week after week after week after week.”
That has been Andreea Corden’s life for years. Now 40-years-old, she has spent decades in and out of hospital, with a devastating combination of illnesses.
Andreea has Addison’s disease, alongside stage four endometriosis. The Addison’s disease, a rare condition where the adrenal glands don’t work as they should, leaves her overwhelmingly weak.
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While the severe, deeply embedded endometriosis leaves her in immense pain.
“Addison’s is seen as a disability, pair that with endometriosis and you get a really funky cocktail,” the Stockport mum told the Manchester Evening News.
“I have lived with severe endometriosis and Addison’s Disease since the early years of my life. Long before I understood what ‘normal’ was, I learned how to survive – quietly, painfully, and often invisibly – so I could keep up with everyone else.
“Over the years, that fight has cost my body dearly… Addison’s prevents the body from having a biological response to stress.
“My adrenal glands don’t work and don’t produce the right hormones. If an Addison’s patient gets into a stressful situation, our hearts can stop. I’ve had to have my heart restarted once, twice, or more.
“Then comes endometriosis, which is an emotional and physical stress.”
Andreea says she has endured six major surgeries, countless hospital admissions, and repeated adrenal crises. “Each time I reached a milestone, I believed – or was told – this would be the last. It never was,” she says.
Then, everything got worse around two years ago. Andreea had to leave her job at a cosmetic and medical firm which she ‘loved dearly’, but ‘had to leave because my body couldn’t keep up with the job demands’.
In February last year, she underwent another surgery. Andreea and her doctors believed this ‘would finally bring relief, and that it would be my last gynaecological operation’.
“Instead, I was left significantly worse,” she continues. “I suffered complications that resulted in severe ongoing pain due to nerve damage, loss of normal bowel and bladder function, months of escalating symptoms.”
The Stockport mum has battled endometriosis and Addison’s disease since her early life(Image: Manchester Evening News)
Andreea, an aesthetics specialist, says doctors first thought this aftermath was temporary, but the symptoms persisted.
“During a later hospital admission for an adrenal crisis, a doctor finally diagnosed me with stage four deeply infiltrating endometrial tumors in the base of my lungs, my bowel, my colon, my bladder, and inside my right hip bone,” Andreea explains.
“That came as a shock, because the doctor who operated on me last February said he’d removed it all, including from my bladder, bowel and other places. Then I had a total hysterectomy.
“I wonder if I’d had more tests in the rest of my body, some of this could have been prevented.”
Andreea was accepted onto an experimental treatment programme using chemotherapy drugs to stop the spread of her illness. But she says the treatment had a side effect of more kidney deterioration.
“Another treatment is basically vivisection, and I’d have to live without half of my organs if you add all the bits up that would be taken out,” shares Andreea.
“In the meantime, my health continues to decline. I’m getting kidney infections and my kidney function is massively decreased, made worse by treatment.
“I’ve always continued with life as usual, I never thought I might die. I’m a professional woman, through and through. I power through everything, but this year I’m just getting worse and worse.”
‘I’m dragging all my family with me in all of this,’ says Andreea(Image: Manchester Evening News)
Andreea is supported by an ‘amazing partner’, along with ‘his family who adopted me straight away’. But her health still takes a toll.
“Everything that happens with me impacts our family, he takes it on with me,” she says. “But I’m dragging all my family with me in all of this. It’s just doom and gloom, and their pain might be taken away through me.”
Now, Andreea is trying to fundraise to pay for preventative treatment in a bid to turn her health around.
“I need to be on a preventative treatment that will stop some of these things happening ahead of time, like the kidney infections. My risk of dying is so high when you combine the Addison’s with the rest of my health now,” she tells the M.E.N.
“To prevent further organ damage I asked my doctors to escalate me to immunotherapy – treatment that exists, is used internationally, and is designed to strengthen the body rather than destroy it,” Andreea also writes on her fundraising page. “I was refused.
“Not because the drugs don’t exist – but because they are not available under the NHS. I have since found a private specialist clinic in Bucharest, Romania, that can see me immediately and provide this treatment. They are ready to help me.”
She says the full cost of the travel and treatment is £30,000. “My life has been reduced to a number: £30,000,” Andreea says. “That is what stands between my son and growing up without his mother, after already having to grow up without his father.
“I am asking for help because I have exhausted every option available to me under the NHS and without urgent private treatment, my body is failing.”
“[It’s] money my family and I simply do not have,” Andreea continues.
“This fundraiser is not about comfort. It is about survival.
“It is about giving me access to treatment before further organ failure occurs, giving my body a chance to recover instead of being destroyed, giving my son a future with his mother in it.”
So far, Andreea has raised just over £10,000 of her goal. The Manchester Evening News has approached NHS England for comment.