The Crohn’s Saga has officially returned! I had a my surgery a month ago and am recovering nicely. Thank you all for the thoughtful messages.
As far as The Crohn’s Saga goes, in this comic, we are back in October 2016. I’d been on disability from work since that July and I was home after having been hospitalized for a few weeks in September. My doctors were trying cyclosporine as a last-ditch effort to get me stable and get the Entyvio to kick in, but the side effects (including the shakes) were wearing me down. In the previous comic, Relaxation Trip, you saw that I was starting to fall apart physically, mentally, and emotionally. I needed relief, but my doctors said I was too sick to go on a trip.
Luckily, my parents were going out of town for a long weekend. That sounds terrible, I know, but please remember that I was desperate for an escape. A weekend in the suburbs where I could just be alone and not have to talk about anything or think about being sick in front of anyone would be heaven.
This request caught me off guard though. It was such a normal (and reasonable) request, but I hadn’t been living a normal life for a long time. In fact, I was so far out of normal and so far into a reality where sickness dictated everything I could do, that this otherwise ordinary question snapped me into self-awareness. It made me realize how sick I was, how long I’d been that way, and how much it had altered my life. This sudden awareness made me scared, sure, but mostly it just made me sad.