Category: Crohn’s

Every two weeks, my lovely assistant David has to inject me with a medicine, Humira (Adalimumab), using a “pen” (euphemistic) thoroughly engineered for consumer use. It’s a grey and plum cylinder about six inches long and a half an inch in diameter; it feels chunky and comfortable to hold, kind of like on of those felt-tipped markers for toddlers.

But it’s not a toy. It hurts, and can really hurt at times. Here’s some things we’ve learned to make the experience a more pleasant one.

A courier came yesterday with my first package of Humira®, which will, if everything goes right, take the place of the rather cumbersome Remicade infusions, which required me to spend half a day in the rather grim cancer center at St. Vincent Hospital. Remicade also required me to take a strong dose of antihistamine, lest there be reactions, which knocked me plumb out. Not to mention that Remicade has some fiercely fatiguing side effects.

Humira on the other hand can be injected at home, once we’re trained. I say “we” because my saintly David has offered to do the actual stabbing. I like the idea and hope it does not cause him too much trauma. If anything, maybe he can release some aggression! We are due at the GI clinic in an hour to be introduced to proper stabbing form.

This is for anyone who is languishing on steroids and is puffy or greasy or bloated or sad or sleepless or hopeless or mad. This is what I felt like on steroids, one year ago: Granted, that is a particularly unflattering photo. This one was taken yesterday: So all of you on steroids: take hope. [...]

In Which I go to Iceland When I think of yesterday morning in the manila-yellowed basement of the Portland Clinic, I keep thinking comedy of errors, comedy of errors over and over again, but don’t worry, in the end, it was a benevolent Keystone Kops kind of thing, not a they-took-out-the-wrong-kidney kind of deal. I [...]

“Pretty sure “surprise colonoscopy” is the worst way ever to begin a week.” — Aileen Jeffries, my Facebook wall Via a spectacular collapse in communication management (theirs, not mine), I have come to a situation wherein I didn’t know that I was less than 24 hours away from being knocked out and probed with cameras [...]

Jim’s comment on my last post reminded me of something I haven’t covered here–and I like to cover the crap out of things. That is, what I eat and drink. And the whole interaction with my little Crohn’s problem. We’ll start here. Curiously and counter-intuitively, there has not ever been any direct or observable correlation [...]

There is something like a coup in my insides, pouncing only when unexpected and I have blearily wiped it from my recollection; only when I am blithe and reporting “I feel fine now, it’s gone now” does everything in my geographical center suddenly grind to a halt and then there is squeezing almost like my [...]

A HIDA scan, which stands for hepatobiliary iminodiacetic acid scan, creates pictures of your liver, gallbladder, biliary tract and small intestine. A HIDA scan can also be called cholescintigraphy, hepatobiliary scintigraphy or hepatobiliary scan. A HIDA scan is a type of imaging study called a nuclear medicine scan. This means the HIDA scan uses a [...]

By now you might have heard, or maybe you were party to the chaos all along as I Tweeted the hell out of my Vegas experiences. I got pretty sick while I was down there. I still don’t know what ailed me–I see Dr. Gravitas tomorrow morning–but it set me on tense-edge and I’m still [...]

Ultrasounds picked up what Dr. Gravitas calls “sludge” in my bits. Let me try to rehash what he explained. Later I’ll fact check this. For now, heck, it’s the Internet, anything goes. There is no real “truth”, anyway, right? Bile apparently act as a kind of emulsifier, keeping cholesterol (a fat) in suspension in water-based [...]