Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
For My Sister:
This is basically a test post, but rather than copy/paste the standard volley of lorem ipsum dolor sit amet filler text, this test post was thrown together by the little brother of someone who suffered from Crohn's disease for years, having the quality of life torn out from under her during the prime of her life.
I was probably 14 or so when her debacle started, and I am now 25, so as you can imagine, her doctors had plenty of time to go through the entire lineup of conventional treatments with time left over to scratch their heads and try some of them again.
It didn't stop her from living her life, but it did turn out to be a tremendous ball and chain. Looking back, it says quite a bit that she flew across the country for my wedding. That would have meant very careful planning between airport bathrooms, airplane bathrooms, more public bathrooms, hotel bathrooms, church bathrooms... it must have felt a bit dehumanizing to be constrained to the toilet in this way for roughly a decade, but she endured. She always endures. That's just what she does.
The solution that finally brought her relief was somewhat out of the mainstream, and to facilitate that treatment, her physician went to the ends of the earth, so to speak, all the way to Australia, the land of the kangaroo and the wallaby, where an alternative treatment was showing results.
Sister, the aforementioned physician, and a few others are setting up this IBD TIE to encourage and empower anyone else who is enduring an inflammatory bowel disease. I suppose the old adage, "Misery loves company" applies here, but the real goal is to promote promising alternative treatment methods. No quackery, just alternatives. And hope.
Anyway, it came to be that an IBD TIE blog was in order. Because I've posted some rants in my time, Sister consulted me, was too tired to power mess with creating a blog at the end of the conversation, so I set this up, and here we are.
I hope you'll follow my sister and the rest of the IBD Treatment Information Exchange team as they venture out to encourage relief.
I was probably 14 or so when her debacle started, and I am now 25, so as you can imagine, her doctors had plenty of time to go through the entire lineup of conventional treatments with time left over to scratch their heads and try some of them again.
It didn't stop her from living her life, but it did turn out to be a tremendous ball and chain. Looking back, it says quite a bit that she flew across the country for my wedding. That would have meant very careful planning between airport bathrooms, airplane bathrooms, more public bathrooms, hotel bathrooms, church bathrooms... it must have felt a bit dehumanizing to be constrained to the toilet in this way for roughly a decade, but she endured. She always endures. That's just what she does.
The solution that finally brought her relief was somewhat out of the mainstream, and to facilitate that treatment, her physician went to the ends of the earth, so to speak, all the way to Australia, the land of the kangaroo and the wallaby, where an alternative treatment was showing results.
Sister, the aforementioned physician, and a few others are setting up this IBD TIE to encourage and empower anyone else who is enduring an inflammatory bowel disease. I suppose the old adage, "Misery loves company" applies here, but the real goal is to promote promising alternative treatment methods. No quackery, just alternatives. And hope.
Anyway, it came to be that an IBD TIE blog was in order. Because I've posted some rants in my time, Sister consulted me, was too tired to power mess with creating a blog at the end of the conversation, so I set this up, and here we are.
I hope you'll follow my sister and the rest of the IBD Treatment Information Exchange team as they venture out to encourage relief.
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