hospital

About 1 percent of Americans have diagnosed Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) like Crohn's Disease or Ulcerative Colitis. And about 1 in 500 Americans (0.2%) have ostomies—small openings called stomas that help when their bowels get really screwed up (whether through disease, cancer, or trauma).

I'm in both groups. And this month, I had a second ostomy surgery. I now have a revised stoma, so now I'm in the 0.001% of Americans who have IBD and have had multiple ostomies!

I'm not sure that's the type of 'one-percent' I want to be...

But I digress.

Being in the hospital with Crohn’s disease is miserable.

But before I get too negative, I have to confirm one major benefit to having an ostomy and being hospitalized: it’s a lot easier to give stool samples now. I don’t even need a toilet!

Anyways, while a lot of us who have chronic diseases often laugh it off or put on a happy face, and post to our social media accounts, it’s a slog. It’s not fun. You think long and hard and try anything and everything to avoid a hospitalization—and sometimes the stress you get from that makes the situation even worse!

As a Geerling, when a situation goes upside-down I turn to humor. If you need evidence, go read The Joy of Crohn's. Back? Good.

Take today, for example. Day 3 stuck in a hospital due to complications from having Crohn's disease.

I'm in a bit of an awkward situation: I'm mostly fine, and I can walk around, do most things normally, talk, eat, etc. But I have this one little problem: My poop (due to having Crohn's disease) has gone thermonuclear, and it's now affecting my health.

Apparently I have this thing called CMV Colitis. It's one of a number of ailments that either exclusively affects immunocompromised patients (generally, people with IBD, Crohn's, Lupus, etc.), or makes said patients waaaay worse off than your average person. Like, nearly fatal instead of a low grade fever!

Anyways, picture an average week in a Crohnie's life:

Hello everyone! I'm finally back from the hospital and on the mend. It turns out I had mono, and the combination of a couple immunosuppressants and the mono hit me pretty hard. It was interesting being in the ER, ICU and general hospital floors, and if I weren't wiped from a crazy-high 104.6°F fever in the ICU, I would've spent more time looking at all the awesome devices into which I was plugged!

Needless to say, I'm feeling much better, and I even got back to work today!

Contest - Win a RØDE smartLav! [Update: contest is over]

Note: The contest is over; see the winner here.

Server Check.in (one of the services I run through Midwestern Mac) is holding a simple contest: leave a comment on the blog post Contest - Win a RØDE smartLav!, and you're entered to win a Rode smartLav microphone, to which I gave five stars in my review.

I'm at the hospital this week, so I'll be unable to answer many emails, reply to comments, or post any new content. The spam hammer is still running, though, so you spammers out still won't get any mercy!

Please spare a prayer for me, as I still don't know what's wrong, but did get to experience some amazing new things, like using a toilet that slides out from under a sink, and curling up in a ball while someone withdrew brain juice from my spine!

This week I've been visiting doctors, getting checkups, getting tests, and generally being a lab rat. My health has been better, so any prayers you could spare could be appreciated... but enough about me!

Since I've been feeling not-so-good lately, and since the whole HHS mandate fiasco's been so annoying to me, I've felt relatively pessimistic in the past week.

Well, during one of the many waiting room visits (I hesitate to call them doctor visits, since I usually spend more time in the waiting room ;-), I heard a lullaby play over the hospital's PA system. Nobody seemed to notice it, but I asked one of the receptionists what the lullaby meant (I figured maybe it was employee nap time or something like that, being 3 in the afternoon...).

When she told me that a baby was just born in the labor and delivery area, a little tear caught in my eye. What a great thing to have happen while I was sitting there!

A few days later, I was back in the waiting area for a while, and just before I was called to get a test done, I heard the lullaby again (awesome!)... and about a minute later, another lullaby!