My near death (contains graphic violence and adult situations)

Mushroom Cloud

The following is taken from two posts on a blog I used to maintain over on the Blogspot network. It's all true, and hopefully it will shed some light on things that people are totally in the dark about. Welcome to full disclosure!

PART 1
My story starts in the year 1999. The Matrix was a huge hit in the box office, Y2K paranoia was at an all time high and I was a strapping young high school football player. Mind you, that's American football, or, as we Yank's call it; REAL football. I was a starter on one of the best teams in the state and I had such great fun trying to tear the heads off of pubescent boys. Sadly, my season was cut short when I managed to shatter all the bones in my left leg, but I will always have the memories.

Oddly, about 6 months after my leg healed, I started losing a lot of weight. I went from a large, muscular 210lbs to a positively Ethiopian 140lbs within the span of 7 months and my skin turned quite literally grey. My friends, at least the ones who assumed I hadnt become a vampire, thought I had developed a heroin addiction and started to avoid me. This was fine by me, as I was too busy with the insane stabbing pains in my stomach, the constant nausea and the blood that was coming out of orifices that it really shouldn't be.

My parents decided that I probably hadn't become Noferatu, so off to the doctor we went. After a few tests, they determined that I had Crohn's Disease! "Fantastic", I said, "So what is that then?" The doctor explained that it basically meant that my intestines had a meeting and they all decided that they hated me and that they would routinely punch holes in themselves in order to make my life more uncomfortable.

Yes, my intestines were the internal organ equivalent of a 16 year old girl who cuts herself for attention. How very emo.

In order to take the (metaphorical) razor blades away from my intestines, the doctor put me on a regimen of high powered steroids. Yes, they were the kind of steroids that Pro Wrestlers use, no, they did not damage my testicles (that part of the story comes later).

The steroids were lots of fun. Not only did my skin explode into what resembled a pomegranate, but all of the various parts of my body that could somehow retain water, started to. I was bloated like a pregnant Kirstie Alley, and I still have the stretchmarks to prove it.

The best part though, is that the doctors seem to have fucked up a bit. See, these kinds of steroids are meant to be used in short bursts, but I managed to stay on them for almost 4 years. When you have steroids in your system that long, your joints get a little screwed up. Now, every couple of months, my knees decide to randomly lock up and feel like they're trying to rip themselves from my body. It's fantastic.

What happened after 4 years to end my use of the steroids? Well, this is the part where I almost die!

I started having the intense stabbing pains in my stomach again, only this time they were worse than before. They felt like I was being gutshot, only, they didn't go away and I never got any street-cred because of them. Eventually (when I couldn't walk anymore and could only lie in the fetal position) my father decided I ought to go to the emergency room, and so off we went!

(At the point I have to stop and specify that I LOVE medical science. If it wasn't for medical science, I'd be dead a few times over. Sadly, doctors do not know everything, as you'll see.)

We get to the hospital and I lay on this bed and get an arm full of morphine (which was utterly fantastic, and easily the best thing that had happened to me in years at that point, so I was willing to go along with whatever they told me). Though it was rad, it was less rad having to sit in that same bed for almost 12 hours while the orderlies wheeled me back and forth from the ER to various testing rooms. I was pumped full of radioactive dye and had pictures of my guts taken, I had an MRI (yes, I was scared that it would rip the piercings from my face), the next day, they even gave me a colonoscopy. If you've never had a team of doctors jam a snake-like camera up your ass, well, actually you're better off than I am.

The doctors found that not only were my guts cutting themselves apart, they were also merging back together in strange ways when they started healing. The inside of my body looked like an Escher painting! If it wasn't so damn painful, I would have thought that it was really cool, actually.

So, what do the doctors do to you when it turns out that eating anything makes your body angry and homocidal? They make you stop eating! They took me into a room where they proceeded to stab a huge fucking needle into the soft flesh near my armpit (yeah, it's as fucking painful as it sounds). That needle was then removed and they ran a tube through the huge vein in my arm all the way to my heart! Apparently they planned to feed me through this sick contraption!

Over the next month I had to learn to feed myself through a tube in my arm. They had this pump/feedbag contraption that they hooked me up to overnight that was to administer exactly the right amount of food. I was literally being fed a protein shake straight to the heart. It was totally demeaning, but the worst part was that my brain still wanted to eat stuff. I wasn't actually hungry, but my mouth really wanted to chew stuff.

Eventually I gave in an ate.

Man was that a stupid choice!

My guts kinda exploded again and I had to go back to the emergency room. After sitting there for a while, the doctors decided that the best course of action was to cut me open and just pull out my bitchcakes insides before they could actually kill me. My parents were hesitant, I agreed, and my insides started crying.

On Surgery Day, I was wheeled into the OR and gassed out of my mind. They told me to count to 10 and then the gas would take effect, but I got to maybe 1/2 before I assed out. It could have been the combination of the Morphine drip and the gas, but I slept through the whole procedure and then 12 hours after that.

Once I woke up, I had been eviscerated! I couldn't feel anything, thanks to the drugs, but when I looked down, I had a foot long slice into my stomach and if it wasnt for the staples holding me together, I could have drawn a smiley face on my liver. I couldn't sit up (as they cut all of my ab's in two), and I couldn't really talk very well as I was still loopy from the drugs and kinda terrified about all the tubes jammed into me.

I had two tubes going into my intestines to drain off pus and blood, one tube going into that arm vein thing and then into my heart, one in my jugular (probably to feed the vampires) and one going right into my dick. Yeah, I had a catheter about the width of a pencil. It was horrifying to look at and painful as all fuck to accidentally bump (which happened probably twice a day).

Over the next 3 weeks I learned how to sit up and how to walk all over again. Surprisingly, you use the muscles in your stomach for a LOT of different things!

The hospital had a policy about sending priests to speak to people who are going through major surgery for comfort and, well, prayer I guess. Since I was high as a kite, I had no ability to be tactful, so when the good padre came to see me, my response was "No offense father, but I don't believe in your god, and I don't have the strength to explain to you why logic dictates that he can not exist. So I'm going to have to decline the prayer." The one thing I've always loved about priests (and the Catholic faith in general) is that they are totally cool with whatever other people want to believe in. Instead of getting indignant (or declaring a jihad, like some OTHER religions I know of...), he kind of chuckled, told me that he hoped I felt better and asked if I wanted some pudding. As much as I don't believe in their god, the Catholics will always have me as a friend merely based on that priest scoring me some chocolate pudding.

In major hospitals, while you are recovering from major surgery, if you are in enough pain, they give you a machine that dispenses morphine to you. Not only does it dispense morphine, but it does so at the press of a button. A button that you have in your little, drugged-up hand. Why they thought it was a good idea to give me such a thing for weeks on end, I have no idea, but, it led me to that painkiller addiction I was talking about a while ago.

Don't get me wrong, the addiction is all my fault. I could have stopped pressing that button, but, in the hospital, you don't really have much else going for you, so you may as well get high and watch the Food Network. That, is exactly what I did.

Every day.

For a month.

PART 2
After, (before and during) the whole Food Network inundation, I somehow got the idea into my head that I was making far more money than I actually was. Keep in mind, while in the hospital, I wasn't actually working, so I was making a sum total of no money whatsoever, but I kept coming up with vague, yet detailed plans to buy up bungalows all over the city and sell them for massive profit, netting myself even larger and more grandiose properties! Of course, my mom (the wonderful woman who was sitting in the hospital room for days on end hoping her son wouldn't die, and footing the bill), had to hear all of this, and being the saintly lady that she is, she would just smile and nod. Looking back, I can guess that she was probably thinking of various ways to poison me to death, though.

Eventually, the doctors decided that I could start working towards going home. I was barely able to get up and limp the 4 feet to the toilet, so I could probably manage in my apartment all alone, right?

The fateful day that they came in to take out the various tubes that they had jammed into my body, I was giddy! I hated the painful, Geiger-esque tubes that were feeding and cleaning my internals, and I couldn't wait to have them taken out. First were the two that went into my heart. The one in my neck came out quickly and without much sensation. I should have known that that was a bad sign, but I was high, and kinda stupid.

The next to go were the tubes that were siphoning off the excess blood and pus from my lacerated intestines. Up until this point, I hadn't really taken a good look at the entire apparatus, but I became a little nervous when the nurse pulled out a set of hooked scissors. What were they going to cut? Was it going to hurt? Who shot JR? All of these questions rushed through my mind in the half a second I had before she hooked it into the expanding hole around the tube. A couple of snips later, and she pulled a long string out of the hole. Where the fuck did this string come from? How many other strings had they tucked into me without my knowledge? Why didn't Patrick Duffy have more work after Dallas? It was ALWAYS more questions!

The last tube to come out was the one in my dick. My worst enemy, this tube had caused me nothing but pain and embarrassing urinary itch. I asked them for some sweet drugs, and the nurse kindly smiled and gave me half a syringe of straight morphine. I giggled, and said "FINE! DO IT! EYE OF THE TIGER!" Oh, how quickly I would regret those words!

As a sidebar, I would like to say that during my stay, I had a few very pretty, very sweet nurses right around my age. Since I was young and charming (and having tons of fun thanks to the drugs), they enjoyed being around me a lot more than the usual gross old men they had to deal with. I actually ended up dating one of the nurses after I got out, too.

Did I mention that the cute one, the one I dated, was the one who removed the catheter from my junk? I don't care if you've slept with 10,000 women, or if you regularly deflower nuns, after my seduction of a beautiful woman who literally pulled a blood stained tube from my wounded cock, I'm the reincarnation of Frank Sinatra.

Catheters are held in your bladder via an inflatable balloon at the end of the tube, so to pull them out, they have to deflate these balloons. Deflating things within your bladder causes a lot of suction and also kinda causes your bladder to get all crazy and pull a knife in anger. Before it could start stabbing it's bitches, the nurse start tugging out the foot long length of tubing. You can literally feel the tubes unravel around your internals and as your penis is lacerated from the inside, no person, no matter how tough, sedated or made of bio-organic steel can help but cry.

Yes, I cried. Like a 7 year old girl covered in spiders and skinned knees.

A few days later, they pulled out the staples holding my guts shut (and replaced them with a ton of gauze), and they let me go home. I had to replace the gauze every day, which was a total bastard, but it was no worse than having insane stomach pains every 20 minutes or so.

Over the next 3 months, I became stronger, and able to eat regular foods again. My guts healed up nicely, and it turns out that I ended up with the fantastic side effect of not being able to absorb body fat. No matter what I eat, I never go above 5% body fat or so. I suppose Fate kinda owed me after the attempted murder, and all.

Thus ends the two longest blog posts I will ever write. From here on out, it's all quick, dirty and to the point.

If you have any questions about any of this, or if you too (or someone you love) is facing this whole Crohn's Disease shit-storm, feel free to drop me a line. At the very least, it helps being able to talk to someone, and with this condition not being terribly common, it can be hard to find understanding people.

I've been there kids, I've done it all, and I survived. Good luck and god speed, my tiny finches!