S
SoccerMom
Guest
I can`t tell you all how wonderful it is to find you. I think the support you provide to eachother is fantastic. I don`t even know where to begin so here goes, please bear with me. I have suffered with stomache troubles since I was a child & my Mom was told after many, many Dr. visits that I had a "nervous" stomach & took acid reducers & pain meds. I think the & Dr. & my parents thought it was "all in my head" & I wanted attention (several told my parents that). Thankfully my symptoms came & went & were not too severe. Somehow I made it through childhood by hiding my pain and symptoms from my family & I became unable to speak about these things to anyone & suffered in silence for many years. I am just now able to speak of it with my coworkers.
When I was 29 my symptoms were so severe(I was losing about 17 lbs. per month, I looked like a conentration camp survivor)I finally had to seek a GI Dr.(who was terrible) & after an endo he told me I had several bleeding ulcers whick he treated with antibiotics & pepcid. I didn`t get better though & went back for a colonoscopy & was told I had UC. I was given Asocol & it didn`t help. I barley remember this time frame as I was so ill. At this worst possible time I got pregnant & spent months in & out of the hospital (blood transfusions, fluids, bed rest(impossible for me, if I didn`t work then I had no health ins.) I am from a really small town & don`t think my treatment was as agressive as it might have been, but all is well that ends well! I ended up with a perfectly wonderful child. For the next few years I was put on high doses of Prednisone & 6MP & Colozal & Asacol & every other med in the world (at least it seemed that way at the time), the side effects were horrible & if it was listed I got it , including a 50lb weight gain that won`t go away.I can`t even count the # of hospital stays & blood I have had. My Dr. seemed to just seemed to do damage control.
I finally found a great GI about 2 hours away from home. I had all the tests over again & the new one where you swallow the camera, how amazingly cool is that!, my tests showed that I had Crohns & not UC because my small intestine was very affected & by the pattern of my disease. I am currently on Remicade & Entocort , while I am not symtom free I am much better than I was. I found this site on a yahoo search while researching crohns & I love how open & supportive all of you are so I had to jump on & share my (longwinded
story. Thanks for listening !
