My Crohnstipated Life

Crohn’s Disease is a lifelong condition. We understand it to be a disease in which once someone is diagnosed, they’re going to have one of several different patterns of disease. Fortunately, most people have a milder form of disease, in which they have active symptoms that may limit their ability to work or go to school, but only intermittently and rarely. Some patients have more aggressive disease, where the disease results in earlier surgery, and they may end up with more disability from their condition, and those patients need more aggressive therapy as well. And then some patients will cycle between the two conditions, and with the right therapy and in many cases surgery, they’ll end up with a milder form of the disease that’s stable over time.

The early symptoms for Crohn’s Disease may not prevent a person from going about their daily life. At first it may seem like more of a hindrance than early onset of an actual disease.

Some of the early symptoms of Crohn’s Disease is people having diarrhea or loose stool more frequently than they’re used to having. Other things that people might experience are fatigue, low grade fevers, night sweats, canker sores in their mouth, crampy abdominal pain after they eat.

As the Crohn’s disease progresses, especially when it’s Crohn’s disease of the small intestine, the small intestinal diameter can get smaller and smaller, and as you might imagine, food can start getting caught in the intestine, and so sometimes people in a way, interestingly, subliminally, don’t recognize the fact that they’re eating less and less, or they’re, or that they’re avoiding high fiber foods in order to allow that food to go through without having pain. So people can get quite used to having to really dramatically modify their diet. And the extreme of that is that people start losing weight as a result of modifying their diet.