The Past Two Years

Before I begin giving updates on my treatments, I figured it would be beneficial to catch you all up on how my life has been these past two years.

Let’s start the beginning of my Senior Year of high school. Life was great! I got to hangout with a bunch of my friends, I went to a couple of concerts, and I got to begin the exciting yet daunting college application process. I was living life as a normal teenager, doing things that in the moment I took for granted.

The week before my Senior Year was about to begin I got to do a trip to Disneyland with one of my best friends. It was a lot of fun! I mean, at least it was a lot of fun before I began to lose my voice on the second day, and by the third and final day I was completely mute. But despite feeling sick and miserable I still spent those two full days trudging through the park, because there was no way in hell I was going to let what seemed like a minor illness ruin my trip.

Turns out it wasn’t so minor of an illness. When I got home I saw the doctor and found out I had mono. Lucky me.

Now I’m not going to bore you with all the little ways mono screwed me over during a four month period, but this was the first time when I began to experience some of my stomach problems that would eventually lead to my Crohn’s diagnosis.

Warning: From here on out I will be going into my poop/butt related history. So I don’t want any snarky comments about how crude and gross I sound. This is a crude and gross disease, so if you’re going to follow my blog you’ll just have to get used to it.

Now roughly around the time of mono, it hurt for me to go poop. Excruciating pain. I’m talking crying on the toilet for up to an hour at a time because I needed to go so bad but my body was physically restraining me from pooping. So naturally my mom took me to go see a butt doctor, because no one wants to hear the cries of their daughter coming to the bathroom. And let me just say that this was the most awkward doctor’s appointment that I have ever had. The doctor had me bend over the bed and stuck her fingers up my butt, all while her assistant stood there and watched. I would have been more uncomfortable about the fact that there was someone just lurking in the room during all this if it weren’t for the fact that I was in the middle of one of the most painful experiences of my life. However, this endeavor did lead to the discovery of my anal fissure, which is essentially a paper cut on your butthole. So I was prescribed some ointment and all was good.

Until it wasn’t.

Not long after the discovery of my anal fissure, I began to have horrible diarrhea. At first I thought I had become lactose intolerant, which can happen after getting mono. However, despite cutting out all dairy products I was still having diarrhea multiple times a day. I went and talked to doctors and they all blamed it on stress or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. They just told me to try and not stress myself out and it would eventually go away. So I lived like this for the next few months, letting it become my new normal.

Things went from bad to really bad the end of March.

I was flying back home from a trip to Disney World with my dad, and I felt awful. I couldn’t stop going to the bathroom, I was too weak to even stand in line to board the plane, and I ended up having the first of many vomiting attacks. I was miserable, yet in that moment all I could think about was how embarrassed I was for vomiting on the plane when there was a very attractive guy sitting in the seat in front of me. It was my personal hell.

The months following this I had many more vomiting attacks. And these attacks would last for hours, and by the time they were over I was too weak to stay awake. After the 4th attack, my mom found a stomach specialist to take me to. He performed an endoscopy and found that my stomach acid was coming up higher than normal, but other than that there was nothing concerning, so he gave me medication to help make my stomach acid chill out. And while this medication did stop my vomiting attacks, I was still having diarrhea after everything I ate. But eventually I got so used to this that it didn’t even phase me.

Going into my freshman year of college with my poop problems was no easy task, especially when I chose to go to school out of state. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time there. I made some amazing friends, I got heavily involved with a couple of clubs on campus, and I took the initiative to make some professional connections. That being said, it was also the hardest year of my life. I had to constantly turn down plans due to being sick, I would have zero appetite and have to cut out meals if I had events to go to so I didn’t crap myself, and I found myself missing class due to being stuck in the bathroom (shout out to my roommates for dealing with my crap problems). It was rough, and I was miserable.

When I got home for the summer I had a colonoscopy scheduled within the first two weeks of being home. I’ll do a separate post on what prepping for a colonoscopy is like, but it was quite the experience. This finally lead to me being diagnosed with Crohn’s in May of 2019.

So, here we are now. I will be taking a steroid and an immunosuppressant orally, and then I’ll be getting infusions of another type of immunosuppressant. The first month I’ll be getting 3 infusions, and then I’ll get 1 infusion every 8 weeks for the rest of my life (assuming it works/I don’t have an allergic reaction). Hopefully this treatment will put me into remission.

Now you’re all caught up. While these past two years have been hell, I know that it takes a lot of people even longer to get diagnosed. So if you are currently going through horrible symptoms but not getting answers, it truly does get better. You’re going through the hardest part right now, and I hope you are able to find answers soon.