Posted by Alex Jofriet on November 29, 2012
I started off my life with Crohn’s as a nine year old boy with very little support outside my family … and frankly I just did not want anyone to know. I had some goals – mostly about excelling in school. During my years of elementary school and junior high, I told nobody about the battle I was having inside. I didn’t want anybody to know about it and I certainly did not want to stick out from the crowd. “I want to be invisible,” I remember myself saying.
If you ask my friends now, they will most likely tell you that I stick out like a sore thumb. After you show your face on a video screen in front of the entire high school to tell them about Crohn’s everyone pretty much knows who you are. The other thing they might tell you is that Alex loves not being "normal" and he is okay with being different.
Some of this perspective on my changed life came to light while I was sitting in church listening to a sermon. I honestly don’t listen to all the sermons. Maybe it’s that some of them are just over my head; but this one was different. In his sermon the minister at my church compared the breaking of bread to the breaking open of one’s heart. He says, “We don’t usually think of being broken as a good thing. The word ‘broken’ really has a bad sense about it, suggesting that something is useless because it doesn’t work anymore. But suppose we think of it more in terms of ‘broken open’ and offering a way to get to the inside of the thing.” His philosophy about broken hearts really struck me. I wonder now whether he wrote this sermon about me. Because when I think back I was broken (or at least my intestines were); and somewhere along the way that broken heart or broken situation, in my case, opened up.
I am now okay with everyone knowing I have Crohn’s. I don’t have to hide in a corner when my Mom flushes my PICC line and I am okay wearing my backpack with my TPN lines hanging out and the pumps whirring away in public. I enjoy meeting with my Doctor and talking about my disease with him, and speaking to other people with ostomies and IBD. The things that I hid from before have turned into my favorite things to do. The shy, soft-spoken boy has been replaced by an open, out-spoken one because I was willing to open my heart to my disease.