Introduction and purpose

My name is Emily and I am 28 years old. I recently moved to Vancouver BC from Seattle and have been given the opportunity to spend some time focusing on me. I'm mostly writing all of this down as a way to measure my progress and maybe help someone else along the way.  Due to the nature of disease and a gastrointestinal disease on top of that, sometimes things may get gross.  I'll try to keep it as ick-free as possible, but that's not always going to be the case.  If you still don't want to believe that girls poop, this probably isn't the place for you.  However, chances are that if you found your way here you are someone who wants or needs to learn more about living life with colitis or a j-pouch. I'm about to drop a lot of background here, but it's necessary context for everything that will follow.


When I was about 12 or 13 years old I started to have a lot of digestive problems.  My symptoms symptoms were pretty characteristic of Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn's Diease including severe abdominal cramping and bloody diarrhea.  As a kid, I don't think that the doctors really understood or took me seriously. I believe that my mother was told that it was all in my head or that I was making it up. 

One reason I think that I wasn't taken seriously is that I didn't look like a typical UC or Crohn's sufferer.  One issue that often arises is that the patient becomes very skinny due to the constant diarrhea and malnutrition due to lack of nutrient absorption.  I was definitely not skinny.  A couple of years previous to the start of my symptoms my parents went through a divorce.  I did not take it well and pretty much became the girl that ate my feelings.  Looking back, I think that the combo of crappy food and extreme emotional stress probably triggered my colitis. 

Once I went to a GI specialist the first thing they did was put me on prednisone.  In case you don't know, prednisone is a steroid that reduces inflammation.   It also has lovely side effects like increased appetite and weight gain.  Prednisone did not help my colitis at all but it did make me an even bigger girl.  As a teenager, this was incredibly depressing.  The depression probably made the colitis worse.  A never ending cycle of eating to feel better and being in pain because of what I ate.  Any attempts to lose weight resulted in nothing.  Exercise usually gave me diarrhea and so gym class was a nightmare.

I wish that I knew back then what I know now about diet and how it affects inflammation in the body. I am slowly moving into living a modified Paleo lifestyle, which I'll elaborate more on later.  The Paleo diet (and by diet I mean the way that you eat normally, not some crazy calorie reduction technique) focuses on reducing inflammation in the body. Ulcerative Colitis is an inflammatory disease so, surprise, it's helping.  If I had been able to do this instead of wasting years trying different medications, I would have saved myself a lot of pain and heartache and would maybe still have my colon. 

Four years passed and I was getting progressively worse.  I tried pretty much all the medications available for treating UC.  Not a single one helped and one of the drugs, 6-mercaptopurine (an immunosuppressant), made me so sick I could barely drag myself to school. Finally, after a colonoscopy, my doctor told me that the colitis had progressed to the point that I needed to have my colon removed.  If I didn't get it taken out my doctor told me I would develop cancer within two years. Well, crap.  That's not something you want to hear at 17 but I didn't seem to have a choice.  At the beginning of my senior year of high school I went in for surgery.  They took out all of my large intestine leaving my rectum in place and created a j-pouch from my small intestine. My surgery was done in multiple steps so after the first surgery I had to have an ileostomy for a year.  I even went to prom with my ostomy pouch held snugly against my body with some control top pantyhose. I ended up having a lot of complications during all of this and I had to repeat my senior year because I missed so many classes.

Once I had my take down surgery I honestly did feel a lot better.  I wasn't sick all the time and I lost a bunch of weight.  The j-pouch took some getting used to and having to be in close proximity to a bathroom all the time was a bummer. The bathroom trips are supposed to decrease as time goes on but for me they never really did. 

I managed to get through the rest of high school and then went on to college.  I loved it and felt better than I had in years.  I still had a lot of issues though like having to leave class to use the bathroom or being exhausted all the time.  There was still a lot of room for improvement health-wise.   I left college with a degree in biology and an amazingly supportive boyfriend (now fiance).  I didn't really have the money or energy for grad school, so I moved down to the Seattle area to live with the boyfriend. After working a few jobs I didn't like, I ended up managing a pet store.  The company was great and the job itself was fine but it came along with a lot of stress.  I dealt with it okay, but my guts weren't super happy.

At the beginning of the year, there came a life changer: my fiance was offered a job in Vancouver. Once all the paperwork went through we packed up all our stuff , stuffed our two cats into carriers, and made our way north.  

I've been given a new opportunity and I mean to make the most of it. Thanks mostly to Mark's Daily Apple, I'm figuring out how to get my colitis under control, get my j-pouch to work the way it's supposed to, and just generally be a healthier and happier person.  I'm hoping that what I find works for me can also work for other people, but everybody's different. 

As of right now, this blog is mostly for me and a way to get my feelings out and down somewhere.  Journaling is supposed to be a good way to reduce stress so this is step one in my n=1 experiment :)