An Introduction

Hi, I'm Paula and I have Crohn disease, IBS, a j-pouch, and chronic pouchitis. Click the "about me" tab to read more about my story. After you read this post, of course. ;)

I'm not sure what made me want to start a blog. There are so many better bloggers out there who can tell their story and advocate better than I ever could. Still, I thought I might have a different perspective.

I'm also not sure what I want this blog to be; advocacy, catharsis, providing another view of IBD. To be honest, mostly I think it's for catharsis. Everyone needs an outlet, somewhere to have your voice heard. I'm no different.

When I was fifteen years old I hurt my ankle. My doctor diagnosed it as arthralgia, and I spent several weeks that summer on crutches. My doctor put me on Naproxen, not a smart move. Shortly after that I started having symptoms of IBD; bloody diarrhea, pain and dramatic weight loss being the most prominent. I was taken to the hospital on July 31st. Blood transfusions, massive doses of prednisone (this was 1986, after all), what I thought was a colonoscopy , but which might have been a sigmoidoscopy, with no anesthetic. Within a few days, they diagnosed me with Ulcerative Colitis. That is how I spent the summer of my sixteenth birthday.

There's not much I remember about all that happened 28 years ago. I remember being scared out of my mind and not knowing how to tell my parents about the bloody diarrhea. I remember my father carrying me to the car to take me to the hospital, because I was too weak to walk. I remember my mother reading Douglas Adams to me, overnight, while I was having a painful blood transfusion. She'd read, I'd fall asleep; she'd stop reading and fall asleep; I'd wake up and wake her up, and the cycle continued. I remember the excruciating scope, and seeing the monitor with my bloody intestine in all its gory glory. I remember not knowing what was this "colon" of which the doctor kept speaking. I don't know whether my stupidity was because I was that stupid or because I was so out of it. Either way it still cracks me up.

I know, logically that I am one of the lucky ones. I did not suffer for more than a few weeks, before they came back with a diagnoses. I have no horror stories of years of frequent hospital stays. I do have my hospital horror stories, just not as many as some. I did have to be hospitalized overnight for colonoscopy prep, because I would get dehydrated, couldn't keep up with the output. I went into shock once during the prep and had to be hospitalized for a week. After that, I needed IV fluid support anytime they did a scope. Now that I have a j-pouch, I can handle the prep, just fine.

This is just an introduction to my story. I plan to post as often as I can and, with luck my blog will find a place in this community.