Most days I wake up feeling marginally normal. Then at some point during the morning I begin to feel lightheaded, get a headache, shake uncontrollably. Before breakfast, I count pills out into my palm like an octogenarian from a pill organizer. Two hours later, I race to the bathroom in a desperate attempt to outrun my GI tract, and spend a half-hour there praying that at some point I'll be able to leave. I can't go running anymore without a fanny pack full of carbs, paraphanalia, a cell phone and a small torture device. And the sad part? All this when I'm well in control of the disease.
I'm twenty-six years old. If this disease is affecting me this way now, I don't want to know what I'll be like at my grandmother's age. Heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, blindness, circulation problems.
