Back Again

With many months since my last post, I'm back. I've had surgery for my Colitis and I'm recovering. This blog may become slightly more personal, but I'll keep adding useful information. Thanks, and welcome back.

The Udder Truth

Everyone should be drinking "raw" milk.

Man who can eat a bicycle

Something wacky for you today, and also something many of us wish we had: quite literally, a stomach made of steel. Or, at least a stomach digesting (?!) steel.

Michel Lotito (born June 15, 1950) is a French entertainer. Lotito, who was born in Grenoble, is famous as the consumer of undigestables, and is known as Monsieur Mangetout (Mister Eat-it-all). Lotito's performances are the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and so on in items such as bicycles, televisions, a Cessna 150, and smaller items which are disassembled, cut-up and swallowed. The aircraft took roughly two years to be 'eaten' from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material while a child and has been performing publicly since 1966.

More bizarre people can be found over at the 10 Most Bizarre People on Earth.

Website Joe's Goals Helps Track Health

It's no surprise that the web has a vast number of resources for helping maintain health. Some of them, though, are not as obvious as others. Joes Goals, for example, is a productivity site designed to track whether you are on task or not. Think of a daily "New Year's" reminder. You get points for good actions and negative points for bad actions. In the two days that I have demoed this site, I've discovered a much better use: tracking your health.

Especially for us with IBD, keeping track of what one eats, drinks; when one takes medicine, or when one forgets can get to be mind-numbingly complicated. Not any more.

Take me: I forget lunch meds like it's my job. Therefore, I assign a positive score of 2 for lunch meds (default is one). I also like to have wine with dinner, therefore -- since it's regular -- I assign it a score of zero or neutral. At the end of the day, literally, you can see your score. If you are getting sick with cramps and stomach problems, you won't have as high a score as you would if you were feeling good, eating healthy, and the like. Give it a go! Joe's Goals is an easy registration (they only need your first name), and I haven't gotten an email from them yet.
All the best in health and "goal" setting.

Ulcerative Colitis patients aren't taking their medicine regularly. This is interesting. If you had an illness as serious as this, wouldn't you take your meds? No, why not?

Red Wine and your Colon

Billington Imports has a generous collection of links to articles on wine and health. Finding this on the heels of a recent WebMD article regarding red wine and colon cancer, it is a welcomed page. Lately, I've been drinking more red wine than white, and I've completely cut beer out of my diet all together. How do I feel? Good. Better. Really good. There might be something to this whole red wine thing, after all.

Colitis by Numbers: Our Mission Statement

I take as my starting point a simple premise: more than most strange and esoteric illnesses which plague people daily, Colitis is one that can be brought to bearable-ness based on numbers. This idea is not new; as children we know a few basic things about sickness: when the thermometer is above 99 degrees Fahrenheit, we can probably stay home from school; if you weigh more than 115 pounds, you were no longer able to play in pee-wee football; curfew was 10pm on a school night; we drive at 16, marry at 18, drink at 21, can afford auto-insurance at 25 and retire at 65, and so on.

In a society as grounded in numbers as ours, it seems a simple enough proposition that the ineffable illnesses of Crohn's Disease and Colitis may be slightly illuminated by this same rudimentary reasoning.

As little as doctors actually know (and I'm married to one, it is quite little) about Colitis, there is a basic scheme we are able to follow -- all of us, young, old, female, Jewish, white, holistic healers and medical traditionalists. And this is where my reasoning differs with the doctors -- everyone is different, but the numbers remain (relatively) the same.

Therefore, what you will find here, you may borrow en masse to understand better your illness, or a family member's, or a friend's. This blog offers no cures; just as a guide to mountain climbing alone won't help you summit Long's Peak but will highlight trails and tricks, this site will highlight trails and tricks. It might even help you into remission, but it will not allow you to "summit" your chronic illness. As of this writing, there is no cure for Colitis. There are, however, a set of numbers we all should know.