I second that. There are no stupid questions, just stupid people who might want to make you feel stupid but they are to be IGNORED. And in fact I think it can be helpful to ask your doctor questions, not just for the answers but to see how they respond. Because with Crohn's you definitely need a doctor who is prepared to answer your questions, whatever they may be, and no one should ever make you feel bad about wanting to understand more about your disease. With hindsight, I feel more stupid about not asking more questions sooner after diagnosis...so ASK AWAY!!!!
It's great that you already know how it was confirmed and that the test was basically the "gold standard" for diagnosing Crohn's. That means you can proceed with confidence that it is the right diagnosis.
One of the things I wish I had understood earlier was - and I'm not saying this just because you are a mechanic but because I think this is naturally how a lot of us think about the disease early in the whole journey - symptom/observation A doesn't always relate to cause B, like it might with a car, and symptom X doesn't necessarily progress to Y and Z.
And that's why no one can really say what it means when you have pain on the left hand side and it is just a generalization, and not something to worry too much about, when you hear that most Crohn's patients have right-sided pain.
Having said that it's definitely useful to familiarize yourself with the anatomy of your digestive tract like you would with the parts of an engine. Here's an illustration:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Digestive_system_diagram_en.svg
But basically if you know when you put food in your mouth and swallow it goes down your esophagus and into your stomach, then moves into your small bowel the first short part of which is called the duodenum (it's rare to have Crohn's there), followed by the jejunum and then the ileum. The ileum is the longest part of the small bowel and the terminal ileum (ie. the last part) is the most common area, I believe, in which to have active Crohn's if you have disease in the small bowel. There's then a valve (the ileocaecal valve) before your colon starts, and the appendix is right at the start of the colon too, and your colon goes up from the lower right hand side, across the top of your abdomen and then down the left hand side of your abdomen, where it joins your rectum which is attached to your anus.
So your digestive tract is the whole thing mouth to anus and your intestines are your small bowel plus colon (also called large intestine).
Some people have disease in the small bowel only. Some people have disease in the small bowel and the colon. Some people have disease in the colon only, and with that potentially disease in the rectum and anus.
Much more rarely people can have disease in the stomach or esophagus, though mouth ulcers are fairly common. And some people have extra-intestinal symptoms - joint pain to name one.
You can also generally split patients into groups like those with stricturizing disease and those with fistulizing disease, things like that.
And that's more than I understood when I was first diagnosed
