Month: April 2017

You’ve Got to be Kidding Me – The Crohn’s Saga Part 32

You know that heart-sinking feeling you get when you hear horrible news? Trigger phrases like “we need to talk”, “there’s someone else”, or “it’s serious” are phrases that fill us with a miserable dread. Well, add “you’ll need an ostomy” to that list.

As I’ve mentioned before, most people with Crohn’s and Colitis are terrified of ever having to get an ostomy. Just the word is often enough to make one cringe. How could you ever live a normal life with that? It’s common for people to say they’d rather die than get this. I’ve always been one of them. So, imagine what it was like for me to be told that. I wanted to rip out my IVs, run away, and hide in a pillow fort like I did when I was a child. I wanted to tear my hair out and cry. Instead, I just sat there frozen for hours. I’d endured so much pain and so many indignities for so long. How could I possibly stand this on top of that?

And yes, he really did make that comment about the video.

If you want to know what happens next, you’ll just have to keep reading. Like I said, The Crohn’s Saga is an ongoing story…

Post-Handshake Hand Holder – The Worst Person Ever

Maybe this one is just a Midwestern occurrence, but this violation of handshake etiquette kills me. I’m not a big physical contact guy. Like my trust, physical contact has to be earned. But there are people out there who do this. It feels so creepy and violating.

My fiancé once told me that one of her least favorite songs is Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond. She is particularly creeped out by the line “hands touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching you”. She cringes at that the way others cringe at the word “moist”. And now every time this happens to me, it’s all I think about. Ick.

Ostomy Thoughts – The Crohn’s Saga Part 33

There just isn’t too much to say about “Ostomy Thoughts”. As you saw in You’ve Got to be Kidding Me, I was not responding to the treatments I was being given and I was told to mentally prepare for surgery and an ostomy. When that doctor told me that, I shut down. I didn’t want to sleep or eat or do anything. I was fixated on everything that would change for the worse and I couldn’t think of anything that would change for the better. I may get my health back, but it would come at a cost I didn’t want to pay. All of it just made me so sad.

Impaired – Work

And we’re back at that first job. Once again, this really happened and this is exactly how I remember it happening. You may ask, isn’t that harassment? Why didn’t she file a complaint? Well, she did. As I’ve mentioned before, that company had a strict divide between management and non-management employees. If you were non-management and someone filed a complaint, you were usually fired. If you were management and someone filed a complaint, it just got added to the list and there generally weren’t really any consequences. I had a non-management friend who was actually stalked by a manager. Like, he would follow her home and such. It was bad. She filed a complaint and discovered that he’d done that to several other women. HR talked to him, but nothing came of it. Needless to say, morale wasn’t very good at that company.

Super Drugs – The Crohn’s Saga Part 34

And there it is. My doctor had super drugs up his sleeve. I will say, the list of side effects scared me, but I was willing to try anything to avoid an ostomy. And besides, I was so sick that I had already been living with most of those side effects anyway. The doctor told me that if the drugs didn’t work within 3 days, they would never work at all and I’d need surgery. Thus began one of the worst waiting periods of my life.

Did the super drugs work? That’s for me to know and you to find out. Tune in next time…