Living

In honor of IBD Awareness Month, we'll be interviewing members of the online IBD community, sharing their stories, and helping to raise awareness and understanding about Crohn's disease and ulcerative...

Thankfully, I have a very caring mother who is worried about me for obvious reasons. However, every day she asks me how I am which includes how I slept, how...

It can be really hard to be happy when living with an autoimmune disease. Debilitating symptoms, isolation from friends, food anxiety, chronic pain and fatigue and other aspects of our...

When I was little I was very close to my single mother. I took on the role of being her supporter and best friend and did everything I could to...

In 2011, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. If I knew then what I know now, I think it would not have been as difficult for me when I realized...

Finally, the winter is over!  Even though it wasn’t particularly bad weather-wise, everybody looks forward to Spring.  It stays lighter out later into the night, the warm sunshine brings happiness...

Every year, many Americans are forced to change insurance companies. Sometimes you are forced to change your care providers and specialists because of new insurance choices about who to include...

Even people who have nothing wrong with their GI system will and do get stomach aches. When a healthy person gets sick, they heal in a few days. For example, if my...

Bitterness, anger, frustration. All of these emotions are quite common among patients living with a chronic illness. Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are not immune to any of these...

I know how easy it is to get frustrated with this disease. After all... I could go on and on. However, with all those frustrations and the terribleness that can...

To my darling husband, Sometimes I watch you in awe of how loving you are to our 2 wonderful children and see how caring you are and then... I remember...

Dating with a chronic illness such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease can be more than just a little disheartening. We all fear what others might think of our illnesses, scars, quality...

Do you ever feel those hunger pains but resist eating because you know your body does better when there is minimal food in it? I do. When a person suffers...

I can’t make excuses, but here I am going to. I wanted to start at the beginning of the year, working out. Of course the first of the year came...

This is part two of a series. You can read part one here. After about ten minutes, I found a tiny ninja staring back at me from my sketchbook. She...

Motivating your family to help with household cleaning can be challenging. For people living with a chronic illness, it can be difficult to ask for more help, or even tempting...

The one thing surgeons don't tell you about is the nasogastric tube. The nasogastric tube, otherwise known as a "NG tube" is placed in your stomach after surgery. What does...

I am not going to lie, I love diet soda. The taste, the carbonation, it's all good. The only problem is that artificial sweeteners totally destroy my stomach. Don’t get...

It's so easy for me to sit here looking back. I don't have the waves of agony crashing over me, taking my breath away and my ability to focus. I'm...

I had to go to the dreaded ER a few weeks ago. As most of you know, the emergency room is a definite last resort for so many reasons. You...