Crohn’s disease: a disease that is still shameful and taboo

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are on the rise worldwide. Among them, Crohn’s disease affects nearly one in a thousand people in France. For them, it is a daily handicap. In some cases, the pathology can have very serious consequences on health: malnutrition, acute colitis, colon cancer, etc.

severe malnutrition

Juliette Mercier was one of these serious cases. author of the book, My Crohn’s life: story of a survivor with a sick intestineshe tells yahoo how she nearly lost her life to illness. At 15, she felt the first symptoms, mainly stomach pain and diarrhoea. The disease can sometimes cause fever, fatigue and various deficiencies. During an appointment with a gastroenterologist, a colonoscopy is carried out and the diagnosis falls for Juliette: she suffers from Crohn’s disease. For several years she lived with it, taking medication, but her symptoms worsened until “to narrowly escape death“.”I weighed 37 kilos for 1.69 m”, she says. At the time, she was a teacher and the consequences of the disease handicapped her during lessons, so she stopped eating a few days before working “so as not to have digestion and not to have diarrhoea, (…) because it is difficult to manage a class when you have to go to the toilet every 5 min”.

Frequent operations

When he arrives at the hospital, his vital prognosis is engaged, and his only chance of survival is to undergo an ileostomy. “It is a definitive operation where we will remove the diseased part of the intestine, and sew the healthy part on the abdomen.she develops. I have a piece of intestine protruding from my stomach and I put a pocket like a bandage, which will collect the stools.” According to French National Society of Gastroenterology, operations are frequent in this pathology. “In Crohn’s disease, 50-70% of patients will require surgery within ten yearsspecifies the SNFGE. It is for the surgeon to resect the diseased part of the intestine or to repair a complication.” On the other hand, the definitive stoma, that is to say the establishment of the pocket, is rather rare, according to the union.

A found freedom

Initially, Juliette struggles with this perspective. “I found it ugly and disgusting”she confided to yahoo. But she is slowly learning to live with it. “I have regained my freedom, I no longer have any symptoms. What may be off-putting is really not important compared to all that it brings, she observes. The value of life is not in what you look like.” Concretely, the stoma is an opening, of rounded shape. “Its average size is between 2 and 4 cm in diameter depending on its location”indicates theNational Cancer Institute, because it can also be a remedy when a tumor is present in the digestive tract. “After the learning phase and with the habit, most people who live with an ostomy have a normal life, resume their job or their activities, practice a sport, etc., it is specified. For Juliette, this is precisely what allowed her to return to a normal life.