Hi! I'm back. It's been a year since my last video... it's been a really long time.
For those of you that follow me on twitter you might know that the reason for my absence is that
i've been having some health issues. The short version of this video is i have Crohn's disease
and that is an autoimmune disorder that is not curable but it's treatable. I had the most painful
year of my life - it was terrible - but I had surgery and treatment and i'm doing a lot better,
and I'm excited to slowly start making videos again but i want to tell a longer version of
that story because while millions of Americans suffer from Crohn's disease most people including
myself a year ago don't even know what it is and also because it's helpful to hear stories
it was certainly helpful for me when i started going through this disease so i'm hoping that it
can help someone else full disclosure i'm going to talk about my butt in this video and if you
think that talking about things like inflammatory bowel disease is gross well i mean the reality is
that this is a debilitating and excruciating disease to have and adding in a layer of shame
not only makes it more difficult for people with this disease to just go and live their life
but it also can prevent people from going to a doctor to talk about it and get diagnosed it's
actually dangerous so uh grow up or just go watch another video i don't mind in December of 2020
i was feeling really stressed out about climate change um as per my last video a year ago
and i started having pain in my bum after i went to the bathroom one day
and i talked to a doctor they said it was probably just hemorrhoids maybe a tear
and i thought it would just go away and you know weeks went by and it got a little better
sometimes and i'd start making videos again and then it would get much worse and over the months
as i went to doctor after doctor i think i went to a walk-in clinic about 10 times i don't have
a family doctor like a lot of Canadians i just can't get one um but over over time
they kept telling me it was just hemorrhoids or a fissure or a tear and it just slowly kept getting
worse and worse it just never fully went away i never got better and i was told after doing
a lot of death i was told that the only real way to really know what was going on down there
is if i had a colonoscopy and by April 2021 i finally got put on a very long wait list
for that colonoscopy quick rant about Canadian healthcare at the best of times it is not very
good at dealing with people that have chronic illnesses and the Covid-19 pandemic is not the
best of times it's kind of like the whole system has had its supports hit out with a sledgehammer
doctors and nurses are really really stretched thin hospitals are overrun with people suffering
from this pandemic often unvaccinated people what that means is that surgery non-elective surgeries
and scopes like colonoscopies kept getting pushed further and further back so it took me a very very
long time to get to be able to have the scope that i would need to get diagnosed by the time summer
rolled around i was in absolutely excruciating pain i couldn't walk or stand or sit or
laugh or cough or really do anything without a ton of pain actually at the time i described
it as if it was like some sort of monster or alien was burrowing its way out of my butt
and it sounds kind of that description now seems a lot like that scene from alien where
the alien bursts out of the person's chest sorry for the spoilers it's like this but gorier turns
out that that scene was written by a man named Dan O'Bannon who suffered from Crohn's disease
and that was in part his depiction of what it felt like for him tragically the screenwriter
dan O'Bannon passed away from complications with his Crohn's disease in 2009. In august i finally
had my colonoscopy and at that point i'd lost about 25 pounds or 12 kilograms and i had become
a regular with the paramedics in the ambulance and at the hospital it was bad but finally
thankfully i was put under general anesthetic and they did the colonoscopy they took the biopsies
and before i knew it i was waking up groggy and still a little high frankly from the anesthetic
and my family and friends weren't allowed to be there because of Covid-19 but the surgeon
was there and she told me that the inflammation that i had was consistent with Crohn's disease
and i told her love you and then probably forgot the entire conversation because of
the anesthetic but luckily i had it recorded so i get to keep that memory and that's how i
found out that i probably had Crohn's disease and eight months and 18 days after my initial
symptoms a gastroenterologist confirmed it i have Crohn's disease okay so what is Crohn's disease
well it's it's when your immune system sort of goes rogue and starts attacking healthy tissue
in your gastrointestinal system Crohn's disease is just one type of inflammatory bowel disease
or IBD which is very different and unfortunately much worse than IBS (Irritable* bowel syndrome)
unfortunately we also don't know very much about Crohn's including what exactly causes it we do
know that there's a genetic component that it runs in families we know that flare-ups of the disease
usually happen alongside stressful events like the one that i had around climate change in 2020 and
we know that most people with Crohn's disease also have an infection of a specific type of bacteria
in their guts but we still have more questions than answers when it comes to Crohn's people tend
to get diagnosed with Crohn's disease when they're younger or as kids but even though the diagnosis
is the same no two people with Crohn's experience the same sorts of symptoms
in the same places at the same level of severity so some people go on to live totally normal lives
almost entirely in remission with very mild inflammation and everything is pretty good but
more often people with Crohn's disease do at some point need to have surgery for their illness often
because prolonged inflammation in a specific region usually somewhere in the intestines
has damaged tissue to the point where it needs to be removed a lot of people with Crohn's disease
have 10 or more bowel movements every day so as you can imagine this can be an exhausting painful
and frankly embarrassing disease to live with while there is currently no cure for Crohn's
disease there are thankfully treatments personally i'm on immunosuppressant therapy called Inflectra
and i basically go into a clinic every other month and i sit in a chair and for an hour they pump
this immunosuppressant into my bloodstream and that helps keep my immune system in check
and i get to do that every other month for the rest of my life and that's you know honestly
a good thing these medications weren't have they haven't always been around more and more
treatments are being developed all of the time for Crohn's and i'm so grateful for that and
now seems like a pretty good place in the video to introduce the foundation that this video is a
fundraiser for the Crohn's and colitis foundation which as their website states is a non-profit
volunteer fuelled organization dedicated to finding cures for Crohn's disease and ulcerative
colitis and improving the quality of life of children and adults affected by these diseases
i know i've personally found that their resources have helped me a lot on my journey so they're
a great organization in addition to their research and if you have a few dollars to spare
please do so uh i have there's links down below um i've set the
goal of this fundraiser arbitrarily at five thousand dollars and to get the ball rolling
i'm putting in a thousand dollars of my own money as someone who used to be pretty
squeamish i gotta warn you that the next section is a tiny bit graphic and if that's not your jam
that's totally okay you can skip ahead to the part in the video that says recovery
I've warned you in addition to finally getting a diagnosis for Crohn's disease the colonoscopy
also showed that my inflammation had gone on long enough that i had a little fluid filled
cavity right next to my anus and that had built up enough pressure that it was trying to drain
and it had created two channels or little tunnels called fistula right to the surface of my skin so
i now have three buttholes technically yay so i ended up needing surgery to have that cavity or
abscess cleared out and to have these two wires called setons installed in the fistulas they were
there are there to to allow that area to continue to drain so the issue doesn't start all over again
i kind of have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these strains um i'm glad that they're there
because they're helping keep me healthy but they are messy and sometimes literally a pain
in the ass but we'll see hopefully in a few months i might be able to get them removed
but i also might just have them for the rest of my life so that's special and it's been something
that i've been working on coming to terms with but yeah in general um i'm doing a lot better
it's been about four months since my surgery and since i started on immunotherapy and it has taken
most of that time for me to be feeling as good as i am now for me to be back on my feet and living
a pretty much normal life and i think it took me a lot longer than it would for most people that
had a similar surgery partly because it took me so long to get help that by the time i had
but by the time i got help i was in really rough shape so i'm glad that i'm finally now doing well
it has been a journey it was easily the most difficult year of my life um like difficult
emotionally and mentally i mean i went from being able to run marathons and climb mountains to
literally having to crawl to the bathroom and having that be the only thing that i could do
uh so that's been hard and also just experiencing that much physical pain was traumatizing so i'm
thankful that i'm able to do therapy because that's helped a lot and i'm also thankful to have
people in medical professions that do research on these things have healthcare professionals
that can do surgeries and give me medication and also just so grateful for my friends and
my family who have supported me through all of this literally all of these people saved my life
um thank you and thanks also to people that reached out on twitter or email or whatever
from from this channel just wondering if i was okay i really appreciate you all of you
checking in i'm sorry if i didn't respond to as many as i would have liked i was just
having a difficult time but thank you it did mean a lot and it still means a lot if you're
wondering what you can do to help out people with Crohn's disease obviously you can just go
to that link down below this video to donate to the Crohn's and colitis foundation if you
have the means but if you don't there's some some free things on this little list as well including
simply you can just talk and act in ways that help to limit the social stigma around people with IBD
less shame the better it just makes our lives a lot easier something i've learned in coming to
terms with this is that it's really important to just give people the benefit of the doubt
Crohn's disease is one of many invisible disabilities meaning that
even though i'm struggling you would never know it by looking at me because there's no physical
visible manifestation of it so just give people the benefit of the doubt be kind to strangers
you never know what people are going through and just believe people when
they say that they're suffering while i know it usually comes from a place of wanting to help
try not to offer unsolicited advice unless you're a YouTuber but for real if you want to help just
be there for people when they need you and listen to their needs lastly if you've only
recently been diagnosed with Crohn's disease i'm sorry it sucks but i'm right there with you and
there's a lot of people that are there for you i've left some links in the description to some
communities and to some resources that have really helped me hopefully they can help you as well um
yeah now that i'm literally back on my feet i'm very excited to be able to make videos again but
i have no idea what my release schedule is going to be like so please just be patient with me um
it might take me a while i love all of you and thanks for watching.