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Loss of Appetite and Weight Loss

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Heads up I’m ruining my chances of ever getting another date with this opening paragraph. So, I went for friendly drinks with an ex and they agreed they would share an embarrassing story with me if I told them one of mine. I told them that (at that point in time) I currently had thrush. I told them I had thrush with so much confidence that they decided my story wasn’t embarrassing enough to justify them sharing theirs and that I had to think of a better one. I personally think telling an ex I had thrush was very embarrassing, but I guess this just proves embarrassment can be masked by pride, bravery and pretending to be confident. I want to state here that thrush is a taboo subject, but it should be talked about more because it’s a health issue and it shouldn’t be embarrassing. (Also I guess Crohn’s can make people more susceptible to thrush), which is why I’m reluctantly bringing it up in this blog. Now to link thrush to the main focus of my blog, I’ve felt a similar awkwardness with
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Balancing Three Jobs with a Bowel Disease

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  When people ask me what Crohn’s is, I usually just tell them, ‘ermmmm it’s a bit embarrassing it basically gives you diarrhoea’, which is really stupid of me because then people think that shitting all of the time is the only problem I have. For example, I told some arsehole boy I went on a few dates with I had Crohn’s because we were going for drinks and I can’t drink caffeine or fizzy drinks and I also don’t smoke, and he was like, ‘yeah I get why you can’t smoke or drink coffee cos they make you like instantly need a shit’, but actually I don’t drink caffeine because I get acid reflux and it gives me chest pain until I puke – and I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to smoke because we have an increased risk of bowel cancer. Anyway he also told me after complaining I was too tame on a night out that I need to ‘live a bit more’, which is a joke – he was completely unaware of the extent to which I battle my symptoms both on nights out and within the three jobs I’m working each week.
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Strength

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Would I describe my body as strong? Definitely not. I am constantly asking my housemates to open jars for me. However, I do know that my body is strong because back in May I was making it go to dance classes whilst it couldn’t properly walk. And now, less than a year later, most of the time I am feeling almost as healthy as I was before I even started showing symptoms. Yeah, maybe I’m not as fit as I was before, but that’s just the fault of my own laziness for not taking myself out for a run. I think that the human body is amazing. And maybe it took me to get ill before I could realise that, but it is something I will hold on more than ever throughout my time being healthy again. People say that becoming ill makes you stronger. Controversially, I would like to disagree with this statement. Because I think we already have this strength within us – we just haven’t needed to use it yet. Perhaps we learn courage from when we get ill, but strength is always there inside ourselves. I mean, c
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Coping with going back to University

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I'm struggling to figure out the difference between tiredness and laziness. Sometimes I’m like, “You’re ill, you need to cut yourself some slack”, but then other times, I look at myself and I’m like, “Maybe this is too much slack - it’s been a whole week and you have done absolutely no uni work, your room’s a tip and you’re out of clean underwear.” Boldly I have decided that in conjunction with balancing the final year of my degree with my extreme tiredness, I am also going to direct a play that I’ve written and named “Clean Shaven Pubes” - with a cast of thirteen, which adds no benefit or credit towards my degree. Nevertheless, realistically, I am finding that I have gained more life skills from doing the play than I have with anything else I’ve done during my time at university and hopefully it will be for a good cause, so should be worth it. (The play is aimed to encourage young people to see a doctor if they are experiencing any unusual symptoms and to raise awareness for invis
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Bravery, Recovery and my Weight Loss Story

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  I often look back to my night out in Malia on my holiday with our family friends last summer. I think it’s fair to say I drank a lot that night and my memory of the night is kind of fuzzy, but I remember at one stage drinking a large blue drink out of a teapot. Anyway, the next morning we were all very hung over and I was nibbling on a plain piece of baguette and my brother and one of the other boys were telling us about how their shit had come out bright green that morning. No-one else seemed to have experienced this and everyone laughed at them and told them how that wasn’t normal, but for some reason I was too scared to say that mine came out bright green too. I wonder why I thought it was okay for the boys to talk about their green shit, but not me; perhaps I thought it was unladylike. But now, after being diagnosed with Crohn’s, I truly feel brave enough to say that I, Lucy Aitkins, did a bright green shit after my night out in Malia. If there’s one thing my experience with Cr
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Accepting I have a lifelong illness

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  I’ve always liked to fantasize that I’m a character in a period drama. I’d be an elegant young lady swept off my feet by a charming young gentleman, a Jack Dawson, or Laurie from Little Women, or Pip from Great Expectations type and we’d run away together and live an enchanting, picturesque life in the countryside. The truth is if I was actually born in that period I guess I would’ve just ended up dying an unglamorous death whilst sitting on the toilet. Taking in the fact that I now have a lifelong disease has been something I’ve been working on day by day and I think will take a while for me to get to grips with. When it first crossed my mind that I’m technically ‘diseased’, my whimsical brain immediately conjured up images of rats and flies and dog shit and rabies and thought, that’s really gross I don’t want to be labelled with that. But then I thought, Crohn’s automatically gives me a diarrhoea label anyway, so adding on the word ‘disease’ doesn’t really make it any worse. But
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