Not so pleased to meet you, Ulcerative Colitis.

So, a few people have suggested I blog about my recent adventures with a digestive disorder that came on like a freight train, refusing to relent until an emergency disembowelment ran it off its tracks.  That train was Ulcerative Colitis (UC), an Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). At first, I wondered who would want to read a sob story about a middle aged woman's gut problems. Boring and kind of gross, right? Well, after mulling it over for a while, I decided that I do not give a crap (scuse the pun) about who is or is not interested. Or who might be offended or grossed out. Digestive diseases are exponentially more widespread than you might think. Sixty to seventy million people have them in one form or another, 1.4 million of those suffer from an IBD. I need a place to document all that I've learned and experienced in this journey for my own amusement. And perhaps growth and healing. Who knows, maybe it will help someone else someday.

This wacky trip all started shortly after Thanksgiving 2011. My husband, kids and I spent the holiday weekend in Denver with some friends. What began as travel related irregularity turned quickly into painful bouts of bloody diarrhea several times a day. By mid-December I was up to 10-15 mad sprints to the commode, losing weight, experiencing overwhelming fatigue, cramps and nausea. I got kind of worried (actually my husband, Jeff, got worried) and called Cleveland Clinic's appointment line to find doctor who could help me. I was assigned a time slot with a colorectal surgeon, Dr. G, that very same day (What I needed at that moment was a gastroenterologist who would treat it medically first, but what did I know). I had no idea what was going on, and really didn't think it was all that serious because I had similar symptoms several years prior to this, following the birth of my now 9-year-old daughter. The GI who did the colonoscopy at the time said all he saw was bleeding hemorrhoids. He gave me some anti-diarrhea pills and it went away. I was confident that something similar was going on.

IBDs include ulcerative colitis (UC) and Chron's disease (CD). Both diseases occur when your body's immune system malfunctions, causing an overabundance of white blood cell buildup in the mucosal lining of the intestines. The white blood cells release chemicals, which in a normally functioning immune system attack infection. However with an IBD, the white blood cell secretions go haywire, attacking everything that passes through the digestive track, resulting in painful tissue damage. In Colitis, this inflammation is limited to the colon and rectum and creates continuous lacerations and ulcers in the top mucosal layer that can cover parts of or the entire length of the colon. In Crohn's, the inflammation can occur in any part of the digestive system from the mouth to the rectum, and is not continuous, meaning that there are patches of healthy tissue between the ulcerated patches. Also, CD inflammation affects deeper layers of the intestinal mucosa that can form fistulas where the lining wears through and creates a passageway to an adjacent organ.  More detailed info for those who are interested:

http://my.clevelandclinic.org/documents/digestive_disease/inflammatory-bowel-disease-guide.pdf

Following a fairly uncomfortable and embarrassing rectal exam (those proctologist jokes are no exaggeration), Dr. G. suggested that it looked like I had ulcerative colitis, but couldn't be sure w/out a colonoscopy, which he scheduled for December 30. In the meantime, he prescribed some suppositories, which worked for a while, but eventually my symptoms worsened. Following the colonoscopy on December 30 2011, Dr. G. made the formal diagnosis of ulcerative colitis, more specifically pan colitis, meaning that the entire colon was affected, and prescribed an oral anti-inflammatory 5-ASA, Asacol.  I expected that to be the end of it, but it was just the beginning.