The ex-wife has UC. IBD is an awful condition and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Besides the embarrassing physical symptoms described by others (basically uncontrollable explosive bloody diarrhea) it takes a huge toll mentally and emotionally. It is a big embarrassing secret. Add in the why me questions, depression, self-esteem issues and your life becomes an unending roller coaster. Autoimmune conditions are weird. They flare and go away with no rhyme or reason. You can be fine one day and in the hospital the next. No Dr. knows what causes it and no Dr can fix it. The only treatment is trying different chemicals to find one where the treatment is not worse than the disease. Her current treatment of a once a month infusion costs her medical insurance $14k a month?! She is imprisoned by her medical insurance and worries about losing it every day. It is something little understood by healthy non chronic illness people. You need to work to have insurance, but when you are most sick, and sick a lot - you can't work. So fundamentally having health insurance attached to ability to work is just wrong. Someone can talk about their heart attack, or cancer, or diabetes and everyone gets it. Talk about IBD you get a blank look. Talk about the details and no one will ever bring it up again. If you try to stay general and say I have an autoimmune condition people also don't understand and think you have HIV/AIDS. It is tragic because a huge growing number of people suffer from a large spectrum of autoimmune disorders (prob caused by genetic predisposition and long term exposure to low level chemicals in plastic, herbicides, pesticides, etc...) that are prob related in some way but because of how the med establishment treats them separately, they never gain the traction or interest of the medical research community. So that equals no dollars and money mostly flowing towards newsworthy cause such as popular cancers, heart, diabetes etc. No one wants to find the cure for explosive bloody diarrhea. They want to save lives. Tragi-comic stuff. Very sad. On that uplifting note Kudos and thank you for creating something that can help. It is much needed since the disease symptoms and treatment are basically different for every person that suffers from it.
