After struggling with persistent acid reflux and difficulty swallowing food for over a decade, a YouTuber finally received a diagnosis that changed his life.

In a Sept. 28 YouTube video uploaded by vlogger Alfie Deyes, the content creator opened up about his medical history, giving his first update since he told his followers he had received an endoscopy to address his acid reflux roughly 10 years prior.

At the time, Deyes said, doctors believed that his recurring acid reflux — which had become severe enough that he decided to go to the hospital — was simply due to stress. His YouTube channel, where he now has over 3 million subscribers, was “popping off” at the time, and he was churning out dozens of videos every month, meaning his life did involve a fair amount of stress.

“It was really hard to be told the problem — the thing causing all of the issues — was stress, because it was so hard to try and combat that,” said Deyes.

Over the next decade, he tried everything: reducing his stress levels, taking various medications that are supposed to calm acid reflux and cutting out various foods and beverages — carbonated drinks, alcohol, coffee, bananas, bread — that people had told him might be contributing to his acid reflux.

“I had seen so many different doctors at this point,” he said. “Nothing I could do could literally make an impact on just how severe this acid reflux was, and it was so incredibly often.”

Then, the problem started to worsen. He started having difficulty even swallowing food, which affected the amount he was eating. Deyes struggled to keep on weight, he said, and he stopped going to restaurants with friends because he often wouldn’t be able to finish much of his meal.

“Sometimes I would start a meal and have one mouthful, and I couldn’t swallow it. It would feel like the food was stuck,” he said. “It just got to the point where it was taking over my life too much.”

One night, Deyes was on TikTok, and he saw a video of a woman getting a barium swallow test, where a patient swallows a chalky liquid while they’re having an X-ray done to see how the liquid moves through their esophagus. Watching that clip, he said, “changed everything.”

He brought up the test to one of his doctors, who agreed to conduct the short test, though he was told that usually it didn’t reveal much about a patient’s condition.

But sure enough, said Deyes, “Within no more than 10 seconds, [the doctor’s] like, ‘Oh yeah, I can see what it is. I can see what’s going on.’ ”

He told Deyes that he had achalasia, an extremely rare disorder where the sphincter fails to properly relax, not allowing food to enter the stomach as it normally would.

“At this point, I’m absolutely mind-blown because I’m about to have potentially a solution for this issue,” he said. “For a lot of people, it’s incredibly easy to fix.”

At a later appointment, he had a procedure that took less than 10 minutes, where the doctors can manually open up the esophagus to allow food to enter properly. And since it was done in May, he said, he has had no issues swallowing his food.

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“When you’re going through something that you can’t get to the bottom of, it just takes over everything,” Deyes told his followers. “I can’t even explain how different my life is.”