Accepting I have a lifelong illness
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. ...