Crohn's Chronicles: A blog about Crohn's Disease

So, I noticed something today. I was in the grocery store stocking up on end-of-semester snack foods with my brother and I glanced at my hands. Specifically, the palms of my hands. Do you know what I found? Color. My palms were pink. This may not make sense to some of you. Let me explain. Because of Crohn's, I've been severely anemic for the last several years. One way to tell (without a blood test) if you're anemic is if your palms are pink. I learned this when I went to my current doctor for the first time and he asked to look at my (super pale) palms. He then told me, with impressive accuracy, what my hemoglobin count was. I've been feeling really great recently. Not perfect, of course. There are still rough days, but the good far outnumbers the bad. It's been nearly two years since that doctors visit, and my hands being pink again just seems like such a tangible demonstration of the progress that's taken place in that time. Pretty cool.

Alright, I'm very wary of this , but I'm going to give it my best. It was finally happening. After months of feeling awful, Maggie was finally going to the doctor. Or maybe it had been years. Who knew? She couldn't even identify what health felt like anymore, all she knew was that something had to change and this felt like the first step. She sat in the backseat of her aunt and uncle's car on the way to the hospital, (she couldn't even get herself together to make it to the appointment on her own) wondering what the doctor would be like. Her experience with gastroenterologists had not been great so far. "Clearly," she thought. "Just look at the mess I'm in." But as she walked in, she knew this guy was different. The office was comfortable and soothing. Copies of the New Yorker sat on an end table between two cushioned chairs. Maggie walked up to the counter where the nurse sat and said she was there for her 9am appointment. The nurse ha...

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. How, in my life, there are a series of identifiable moments when someone said something and it opened up the world in an entirely new way. These are often called "aha moments" in the feminist community. I've had a lot of these moments. Not all of them have been these incredible moments of clarity that allow me to better identify and speak about the injustices of the world, many of them have been much more personal. Instead of these sweeping realizations, they are slight awakenings. This does not mean that they have had a smaller impact, however. In fact, I think these  moments, more than the grand moments, change the way I live my everyday life. I've had a few of these moments in relation to Crohn's, and I know I'm bending the prompt (to pick a quote and write about it) a little bit here, but I'm having a hard time choosing which of these moments was more important to developing my understanding of what...