Living With Crohn’s

I am now fifty years old. My mom was a nurse, and as far back as High School, I remember her telling me I was going to have intestinal problems due to nerves, and stress. My dad and I didn’t get along, and argued frequently, and the boy I was in love with had a habit of not showing up when he was supposed to, and I didn’t like school. Yes, my intestines were gearing up. It has always been common place for me to feel as if my “stomach” hurt, but in reality, it has always been my intestines. Something I, of course, never wanted to deal with. My mom wanted me to go for a colonoscopy when I was in my late teens, early twenties, but that wasn’t going to happen, and didn’t. Instead, I let all the emotional baggage I was carrying, eat away at my insides, and just learned to live with it. “It” became the norm.

When I was twenty six, I was awakened from a sound sleep by what can only be explained as a knife darting in and out of my eyeball. The pain was intense. I had no idea what was happening to me. I screamed for my mother, who ran down two sets of steps, and told her what was happening. She drove me to the emergency room, and they said my shutter in my eye wasn’t opening and closing the way it should, it was staying open, causing the pain. They gave me drops to dilate my eye and stop the pain, and told me to get to an eye doctor the next day. This I did, but unfortunately, our family eye doctor was very old, and gave me drops that started to cause cataracts, so we switched to a younger doctor. This time, it was a neurologist. He could find nothing wrong. Then, she took me to a hospital, and four doctors examined me and said I had Epstein’s Bar Virus Syndrome, and rheumatoid arthritis, and I would be blind and crippled by the time I was 28. My mom looked at me, told me to get dressed, and she started searching for another doctor. She kept asking the doctors she worked with that she could take me to, and finally, we ended up right across the street from the hospital she worked in.

This doctor was a retina specialist and put me on cortisone, which I had never heard of, and on a high dose, my eye was okay, but I still had to take drops, causing my eyesight to be blurred, which presented a problem at work, since I sorted mail all day.