My name is Heidi. I’m thrilled to share a bit of our journey…

When my husband & I traveled to India to adopt our kids, 15 plus years ago, it was a journey of senses: taste, smell, touch, sound, and sight. I have learned that parenting a child with a chronic illness is also a journey of the senses. When our 19-year-old son, Stephen, was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis the summer before his junior year of high school, we had no way of knowing where that journey would take us.

Hi! My name is Becca, and I’m a junior in the School of Nursing at UNC Chapel Hill. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at age fifteen, and my life has been tremendously impacted by it. I hope to use all that I have learned from my own journey to change the lives of pediatric patients in my dream job as a nurse in an IBD center.

Hello! My name is Nour (means “light” in Arabic). I graduated from college, where I majored in Cognitive Science and minored in Communication. Since 2011, my diagnosis has changed a few times from Crohn’s disease to ulcerative colitis, and then back to Crohn’s disease. It has been quite a roller-coaster! There was nothing I wanted more than to be symptom free and respond positively to medication. It definitely required patience. To share one interesting fact about me…I have been graying since I was five years old! No, it did not all just suddenly happen in my 20’s! As for my age, I will give you a hint. I was born on the same day and year a historical event occurred in East and West Berlin.

My name is Erin, and my daughter Caroline was only 9-years-old when she started losing weight, stopped growing and was exhausted all the time. As she grew sicker, she could not keep up with school, play with her friends, or participate in the activities she loves most: soccer and ballet. It took us almost 18 months to arrive at a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.

After suffering for months (including losing 20 pounds, requiring blood transfusions, missing junior prom because I was in the hospital…) I was told I have ulcerative colitis, a disease with no cure, and that I would need medication for life. Hearing this traumatizing news, I knew my life would be changed forever. I thought I would never recover, and the sickness would continue. I did not know anyone else that had IBD, and I felt alone.

Looking back on my sickest times, I can see very clearly that the one thing I wished I had was someone else with IBD who I could talk to...someone I could relate to and who could understand what it’s like.

Our IBD journey began over five years ago with our oldest daughter. It presented itself more like a thief in the night rather than a bold, coming out. For three years prior to diagnosis, there was a sense that something was not right, but the clues left were random and independent of each other. Add in a misdiagnosis and it would take someone highly skilled to assemble the clues and uncover the mystery.

I stumbled upon ImproveCareNow (ICN) by chance. A predecessor to the network, the C3N Project, had been mentioned in passing during assigned reading for one of my university courses. Naturally, as someone with ulcerative colitis (UC) I was intrigued. Though at the time I was busy with essays, a dissertation and job applications so C3N fell to the back of my mind.  

My name is Missy and I am a new member of the ImproveCareNow Board of Directors. When my son was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in the fall of 2016, one of the handouts I received from our care team at Nemours Jacksonville was a flyer about ImproveCareNow (ICN). That night I signed up for the Parent Working Group and the ICN newsletter.

Sometimes I feel like people expect me to always act a certain way because I have Crohn’s. Maybe you’re thinking I mean people understand and expect me to always be tired or running to the bathroom. But that’s not it; it’s that I feel like they expect me to be happy, bubbly, positive – like I am when I’m advocating.

Body image is a topic that Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients don’t often talk about due to the embarrassment and fear associated with opening up about their experiences with their Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.

It can be incredibly frustrating to feel like you have no control over how your body works or looks, especially given all the messages we receive from the media about how a body ‘should’ look and behave. We wanted to create the Body Image Toolkit as a way to express our experiences, provide tips, and start conversations about body image & IBD. It’s important to know that we’re not alone in our feelings, and that there are so many people who understand what we’re going through!