Not the Way I Thought It Would Happen

Through most of my eleven years of illness with Crohn’s colitis, I was convinced that I would get better. How could I have a disease and how could it be possible that I wouldn’t overcome it? In the early years, when the illness wasn’t too bad, I was convinced that the doctors didn’t really know what they were talking about. In fact, I didn’t take the medicine they prescribed. Instead I dramatically changed my diet, I took a quarter off school, and I meditated three hours a day, and after a month and a half, I didn’t have any more bleeding and I felt great. See? I thought I had overcome it already. And I didn’t have any more inflammation for almost a year.

When it came back after that, I was upset, but I thought it was just because I had grown lax with some of my methods, eating more freely, allowing stress to seep back into my life. So I knuckled down, and worked my toolbox. But this time I didn’t get better. I got worse, and worse, and worse…

That was when I had to acknowledge that this disease was something powerful, and that maybe the doctors knew a thing or two. I started up with the various medications, and from that point on it seemed that I went from one medication to another, looking for the miracle cure. But I still thought I had it in me to overcome this thing. Maybe I did need some kind of anti-inflammatory to help me along, but surely if I ate a perfect diet, and meditated, and did chi kung and tai chi and yoga, and engaged in lots of prayer and affirmations, and thought very positive, and loaded up with various supplements I had researched, and got acupuncture and massage and anything else I heard of, surely then I would overcome this disease.

Instead, no medicine ever got me well, “chronic” just meant all the time instead of periodically, and I was running out of options. That’s when I entered the darkest period of my illness. By this time, I had already been through two weeks of hospitalization, a month of complete bowel rest, and nearly every western and alternative treatment I could come up with. That’s when it became clear to me that I might not be able to overcome this thing. It could beat me. It was beating me. It seemed impossible, but there it was. There’s nothing like sitting down in the bathroom to give yourself an extremely painful shot, and looking up and seeing someone you don’t recognize in the mirror. There’s nothing more lonely than that.

So when I decided to have surgery, it was in the context of, “What the Hell? How could it get any worse than this? Take this [bleeping] thing out of me already!” What was I holding on to anymore? Nothing at all. I had already lost hope, and even as I was going to the hospital on surgery day, I figured at best this might give me a shot at a better life. I was not convinced at all that it would be the miracle I had been waiting for. It was just that I had come up to the edge of the cliff, and I had that giddy feeling that I might as well jump off and see if I could fly.

And that’s how I overcame this disease. I am yet one more anecdote that affirms the idea that God works in mysterious ways. So often we pray for something, imagining that we will get what we want exactly the way we envision it, and so often we do get it but it comes to us in the most shocking manner. Surgery?! Who woulda thunk? Something that was so anathema to me, something that I was convinced was just about the worst thing in the world, was in fact my boarding pass on to this new adventure of life. It’s not the way I thought it would happen, but I am disease-free and I have overcome Crohn’s colitis.