My name is Lindsay. I'm going to be 16 in 5 days!!! (march 4)
I was dx with crohn's when I was 14. August 31st, 2006 to be exact. haha. I started feeling sick about the day after christmas 2005 i guess. not really every day and i thought that the diarrhea was normal, so i just continued on. In April 2006 is when people started noticing that i was losing weight. In may my grandma had passed and that was horrible and i felt really sick but i didn't know why. i thought that it was just because of the stress. I finally went to my pedi. in about late may or june and my weight had been down a lot. I was told that it's prbly gastritis and to take malox. a while later i went back. it wasn't helping and i was losing more weight each time i went. they told me to drink 2 ensures a day and get lots of fiber. that didn't help and it went on like this for a while and my summer sucked. i was always tired and felt dizzy and it hurt so bad. i never wanted to swim anymore and that is really weird cuz i love to and i just didn't want to do anything but lay on the couch all day. my pedi. kept trying to say that i was anorexic. she said that about everytime i went in there. and i had to keep a food journal. it was so bad that i told my dad that i wasn't going to try out for volleyball. then he knew something was really wrong because i would never ever not go out for the team. it is my passion and my dream! so still kept losing weight and so they finally got smart and took some blood and my mom had asked them to check my albumin level because my grandma had died of stomach cancer and she had really low albumin levels. they said that everything came back normal and she forgot to check my albumin levels. i went in every single week for a long time. they took some blood again the next time. my asked again to check the albumin levels, but they failed to do so and guess what? they came back fine again! at this point they were going to send me to the hospital because they kept insisting that i was anorexic. so i came in the next week to my pedi and got weighed and i was down to 79lbs at 14 and 5ft 1. They took some blood and my mom asked [for the 3rd time] if they could check the albumin levels. they finally did this time and on friday we got told the results. [third time's the charm!] They were extremely low. On monday i was referred to the gastro. that was fast. i went there and he took some blood and noticed that my sed rate and white platelet count were really out of whack and i was scheduled for a colonoscopy and endoscope on wednesday. My GI after he was done examining me said that i most likely had crohn's disease. i loved him for that! i finally knew what it was!! and i KNEW it wasn't anorexia because i would never do that. so i was feeling happy about that. but i found out that everywhere had been effected except the esophogus and one little skip part in the colon. my gi said i had a severe case. but i was happy! i knew what was wrong with me! and i had that "i told you so" kind of attitude toward my pedi haha!!
okay, now for meds! i was started out on cipro, flagyl, pentasa, and prednisone. i took the cipro and flagyl for like two weeks. I couldn't have any fiber, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, popcorn, spicy stuff or citrusy stuff (acidic stuff). Since the meds weren't working i started using imuran about a month after. that still wasn't working, so i tried remicade. it worked after about the 6th treatment. i had a couple of reactions, but none later on [knocks on wood] i was on prednisone and that diet for 5 months before i could return to normal eating and it took more than 5months to look normal again. wayy more than 5 months...currently i am feeling fine and i am on pentasa, remicade, and imuran. my GI hasn't told me if i was in remission yet idk why.. but i am feeling back to normal. and i like to think i'm in remission. hah. wow i wrote a lot. hope i didn't forget anything!!
oh yeah-- i missed out on volleyball that year.. i hated that soo much! and i missed out on the first quarter of my first year of high school. i had a tutor come in and help with stuff, kinda like homeschooling i guess. i hated going back with the moon face and EVERY single person asked what happened?? where were you?? that was the worst part of going back..
phew!
i think i'm done now..
Lindsay
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