5 Steps to Prepare for Someone Working on Your Home While Dealing With Crohn’s

Ever have one of those days where no matter how hard you planned around it, everything you did to make it right just fell to pieces? As the only member of my family with an open schedule, repair-person appointments often fall on my shoulders. Not that I mind. I’m home the most and it just makes sense. So, when I know that someone is supposed to be coming to the house to work on something, I always try to plan out my day in order to mitigate bathroom runs while the repair person is at the house. I have hyper-motility and when something important is coming up I try to schedule when it is best to eat. Most of the time, I manage the day accordingly. But that doesn’t guarantee a win.

Once I know what time the appointment or appointment window is set for, I do the following:

1. Wake up with enough time to stretch and walk off some arthritis aches.
2. Start pre-breakfast meds if the appointment is in the morning.
3. Eat breakfast only if there is a 2-3 hour window between food and the repair person’s arrival.
4. Have music playing in the background (I use the house’s Echo system, which can be controlled by an app; if you need a private moment in the loo, you can ease the volume up without drawing attention).
5. Accept that you cannot control everything and if you need to B-line it to the bathroom, repeat after me, “It is okay. It is going to be okay.”

Here’s an example of a day if there is a morning appointment scheduled for, let’s say, 11 am.

I try to make sure that I’m up between 7 and 8 am and to eat no later than 9:30 am. As someone with hyper-motility (food runs through my body quickly), you would think it would be like clockwork. Oh, but it’s not! If I didn’t know any better, I would say that my body is trying to sabotage my life. I don’t think there’s a person I know who would disagree with this assessment. Sometimes the window is needed; sometimes I don’t even know why I bothered.

But all you can do is try. And try as I might, it doesn’t always work out.

There was one particular appointment that has stuck with me over the past few years and will probably never leave. The water filtration system dude and son arrived. I had done everything by the book (my book) and didn’t even eat that much, just toast. But that didn’t matter; it was going to be one of “those days.”

Even though they were working on the system outside, my bathroom just happens to be on the other side of the wall. No amount of volume upping on the Echo was going to help in that situation. You can hear, with every flush, the whoosh of the toilet from outside. I lost track of how many times I was in and out of the bathroom while they were working on the system outside. But when I joined them outside, the older one of the pair said, “Got a bad case of food poisoning?”

My face was on fire, I must have turned three shades of red. But without missing a beat, I handed over the check and replied, “Yep, for over 15 years.” He looked back confused. I smiled and bade them a good afternoon, then retreated inside the house to obsess and giggle over the awkward moment (going on three years now) that had occurred.

On the upside, it wasn’t a disaster. We all have had at least one, if not many, thanks to Inflammatory Bowel Disease. If you feel like commiserating, feel free to share your awkward moment thanks to IBD in the comments below.