I just don’t think people understand what this disease can do to a person
When I first got diagnosed 5 years ago at 15 y/o I didn’t understand this disease either. I thought oh it’s just a disease that makes you shit a lot can’t be that bad. I wish I was right about that but unfortunately I wasn’t. Recently i realized how sick I really was and how much I went through the past 5 years, throughout my supposed to be peak teenage years. In and out of hospitals, getting different treatments, feeling the absolute worst of my entire life but still showing up to school and sports and whatever else like everything was normal. Unless I told them, no one could tell how sick I was. And a lot of people I knew downplayed my symptoms or made me feel like I was overreacting about how sick I felt. Oh you’re fine it just makes you poop stop pretending, you can’t be that tired from it, why are you acting like you’re dying, etc. stuff like that. It’s like people really don’t understand Crohn’s disease and the severity that it can get to. I was in a flare for 3 years straight because no medicine was working. I ended up in the hospital right after I had Covid and had a 104 degree fever because it exacerbated my Crohn’s like crazy. My calprotectin was over 5000 when I got admitted. I was there for 10 days and over the course of that flare at just 17 years old, I lost 35 pounds. Because of Crohn’s, I am a completely different person. My health anxiety is terrible, anytime I get a cold or infection I’m terrified I’ll end up in the hospital again. I still have no energy and always am reminiscing of how much energy I used to have before I got diagnosed. And it just sucks people don’t understand this disease because it just feels like you’re all alone fighting it and there’s nothing you can do about it. And what really hit me was that I have this disease for the rest of my life. I will constantly have to deal with the ebbs and flows of going into remission then flaring then remission then flaring. And I’m sure a lot of people with Crohn’s feel the same way. And it just sucks that no body around me understands.