Crohn’s and Diet — What gives?

A kind reader’s comment catalyzed my thought process to inspire this post. Seriously. My readers are wondrous alchemists that way 🙂

Crohn’s and Diet — What gives?

Curiously enough, I need not reset the year on my time-machine dashboard. We’ve recently visited curious stuff in 1975, but this time I won’t rattle on about Singer minicomputers. This time-travel travelogue concerns a close encounter at the shore of the river Styx at age 27.

The vacuum tubes in my time machine are powered by  rearranging electrons. This permits movement through time, according to a red-herring theory concocted one day while waiting on a bus to Eureka. I’ve heard that one theory is as good as another.

I’ve discovered an intriguing tattoo inspired by experience with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) — something quite striking IMO.

 

Sorry, but we suspect you’re just belly-aching, Bill. We’ve heard that Crohn’s is all in your mind. For the record, would you be nice and admit that?

No.

I visited my doctor on a Friday afternoon —there was unrelenting fever and stomach pain. The pain and fever were still there on Monday morning — so my doctor, being the gullible type,  told me to get my guts to the emergency room. They assigned the nearest available surgeon, one who knew how to remove several yards of intestine. The surgeon was not known for his bedside manner — he informed me that I’d brought the disease on myself by worrying too much. His advice: stop worrying and it will go away — QED.

Bill, you’ve simply become more gutless.

I guess so.

Let’s shove some electrons in the other direction: to 1978. Just a simple corollary if you will. Time is straight-forward stuff. It has a past, a present and a hypothetical future.

This time ’round I had the same Crohn’s flare up symptoms, but something unusual caught my eye while pissing in the pot — gases and solids came out with the liquid. It seems that a fistula (a tunnel) grew from an intestinal wall and connected with my bladder, thereby compromising my urinary tract.

In other words, Bill, you decided to strain the nation’s provisional health care system AGAIN. Had you listened to the wise advice of that first surgeon and changed you state of mind…instead you became ever more gutless.

This time an excellent team of surgeons were available to perform simultaneous intestinal and bladder operations. I spent the following nine weeks in a hospital bed, weaning off Prednisone by eating popsicles three times a day.  Hyperalimentation was a new technique invented by Dr. Stanley Dudrick. A tube was inserted near my right collar bone, through a vein and into my heart. Simple dumping into veins would clog immediately My weight before the hyper-A was 51 kg. Under hyper-A resulted in a weight gain of 454 gram per day.

After a surgery for removal of some more intestine, and an attempt to reconnect healthy tissue to healthy tissue, I woke up with a colostomy — it reminds me of that gentle expression “We’re going to cut you a new asshole” ; in other words, I eliminated solid waste when the excrement reached that rectal alternative. The takeaway: two weeks after that surgery I was back at work and regaining strength.

We do like that part about the rectal alternative, but we do not approve of your language. Just trying to keep things civil here. You’re not very nice, are you?

Junk food is still food

I encountered that chunk of idiocy while researching this post.

Well, you got to die of something

Sadly, nutrition does not interest most physicians. There are head-shaking doctors who rail against vegan patients that have the temerity to answer a questionnaire with an honest response.

It’s very much left to personal choice, and what is called dietary freedom. I suggest this caveat — you’re bucking trillion-dollar industries when you question the consumption of sentient-animals.

You are told that malabsorption results in low B-12 levels, that the most effective solution is cow consumption — the more the better. Bon appetit.

There is not much funding available for the promotion of vegan diets. Following the money leads you to profitable enterprises — a trillion dollars is not chump change.

When I finally realized that cheese, dairy and eggs meant both bad karma and bad health, my health became much better. Perhaps it’s the positive influence of all my kind readers :-).

Diet is only considered if there is a handy pharmaceutical prescription to address it — a little special remuneration in back pockets perhaps, provided by the nattily dressed and manicured, not to mention Happy. HAPPY. H A P P Y Big Pharm reps.

 

Thanks for reading.