The doctor visit today was a follow-up on last week’s round of testing. And its official. I have Crohn’s disease. Not a tenative diagnosis, not even the really strong guess they issued: its confirmed twice over. The small bowel study (yay, x-rays!) showed a classic case of symptoms, albeit rather severe, and the final blood work confirmed it as well. I have Crohn’s ileitis, which means Crohn’s strictly within the ileum (the last part of my small intestines). About 30% of Crohn’s cases are of this type.

I’m feeling a lot better lately, able to eat solid food again (within reason, of course). I’m still going to be doing some liquid foods, and taking it easy on meals, but I’m no longer on a liquid-only diet. I’ve not had to take pain meds for a week, although I will be remaining on the Prednisone for another 3 weeks due to the severity of my symptoms prior to beginning it. After that, another follow-up appointment, and they’ll assign me a different medication aimed at keeping the Crohn’s in remission, since continuing the Prednisone regime I’m on now would be bad for me for more than another month or two.

I could be upset or bitter about having Crohn’s, as its going to be a constant and forever feature in my life. But looking at the past decade with Crohn’s in mind, I can see that I’ve already been living with it for a time; a lot of the issues I’ve had, such as several cases of suspected food poisoning that lacked a clear culprit food, and suspected lactose intolerance that wasn’t really aided by lactase enzyme supplements, can instead be traced to mild to medium symptom flares of Crohn’s Disease. I’m not saying all those problems were Crohn’s, since its impossible to prove one way or the other, but it does paint a rather convincing picture to me. Thus there’s really no sense in getting all upset or moody over something I’ve had for years, just because I have a name for it now.

Plus, I can’t begin to describe how happy I am today, simply because of the lack of pain. The pain was the aspect that was eroding my will and driving me towards depression. It was a near constant factor for over a month, and it wore me pretty thin. But without that kind of pain for a week now, my spirits are recovering admirably. It helps that Michele and I are able to do stuff together again (be it video games, watch movies, or even just go to the store!) without my being in constant pain and discomfort overshadowing it all. I think she is happier now, and that is a huge boost to my spirits as well.

We’ll be taking a trip to Atlantic Beach, NC, this weekend, where my family has a timeshare, and seeing the cousins and everyone for a couple days. They’ve had months of practice on the Wii, so Michele and I are just hoping not to lose too badly to them. Promises to be a relaxing fun weekend, once the driving part is out of the way (ouch on a 6 hour trip, that’s the same distance basically as it was from Maryland!).