Hi I’m Jackie. I’m a 25 year old woman child from my native state of Michigan. I have a bit of an interesting UC story so bear with me while I get my intro out of the way. I was officially diagnosed with UC in May of 2009, but had symptoms for easily 10 years. In October 2006 I was also diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I’m a bit of an auto-immune allstar. Long story short in 2009 I was admitted to the hospital 4 times and the ER 6 times for my UC. Asacol gave me a pericardiac effusion resulting in a lot of pain and emergency surgery around my heart.

After that the goal was to get me on an effective therapy to get my UC under control. I was and have been on steroids since June of ‘09 and have tried Asacol, 6-MP, and Methotrexate. I can’t take any of the biologics because of my MS. My UC has never been in remission since diagnosis and has proceeded to get worse the last few months. My home GI referred me to Cleveland clinic to talk to a specialist who gave me good advice and advised that I should consider surgery. My home GI then told me that the doctor at CC was an idiot and that no surgeon would ever preform surgery on me. Needless to say I was a bit conflicted.

I met with Dr. Remzi in Feb 2010 in regards to surgery against the advice of my home GI. Dr. Remzi was great and urged me to consider surgery. After throwing myself a pity party for a few days, where my only guest was myself…and I didn’t even get cake….I decided he was probably right and I should schedule my surgery. He said most likely he’ll be doing a 3 part surgery over 9 months with my first scheduled for March 25th.

So I’m just at the start of this journey…its going to be a long super sucky one…but I know there are a lot of you out there with me.

oh. Ps. I’ve attached a picture of what I USED to look like…you know before 8+ months of steroids….I hope to revisit this again someday!

p.p.s. I make typos a lot. Deal with it.

p.p.s.s. Why Blood, Poop, & Tears? If you have colitis or crohns, you already know. If you don’t have an Inflammatory Bowel Disorder (IBD) well, not only are you missing out on having bloody poop, but you’re also missing out on the emotional roller coaster and humiliation that accompanies it. I personally felt the title pretty much summed up the past year or so of life quite nicely.