health

Being in the hospital with Crohn’s disease is miserable.

But before I get too negative, I have to confirm one major benefit to having an ostomy and being hospitalized: it’s a lot easier to give stool samples now. I don’t even need a toilet!

Anyways, while a lot of us who have chronic diseases often laugh it off or put on a happy face, and post to our social media accounts, it’s a slog. It’s not fun. You think long and hard and try anything and everything to avoid a hospitalization—and sometimes the stress you get from that makes the situation even worse!

I have Crohn's disease. More specifically, severe Crohn's disease.

Crohn's disease is one of a class of autoimmune diseases. The common theme for these diseases (including RA, Lupus, Colitis, MS, Psoriasis, etc.) is your body's immune system decides it's more fun attacking your own body than it is to attack outside infections.

Currently, there are no cures for Crohns or Colitis (a very closely related Inflammatory Bowel Disease). There is no diet, no lifestyle change, and no pill that can make those suffering from a Crohn's disease flare-up heal permanently.

There are a lot of drugs that can help. I should know, I've been on literally every one of them.

But for many people with IBD, the drugs stop helping (or never help in the first place), and your immune system goes thermonuclear on your guts. This happened to me last year.

Hello everyone! I'm finally back from the hospital and on the mend. It turns out I had mono, and the combination of a couple immunosuppressants and the mono hit me pretty hard. It was interesting being in the ER, ICU and general hospital floors, and if I weren't wiped from a crazy-high 104.6°F fever in the ICU, I would've spent more time looking at all the awesome devices into which I was plugged!

Needless to say, I'm feeling much better, and I even got back to work today!

Contest - Win a RØDE smartLav! [Update: contest is over]

Note: The contest is over; see the winner here.

Server Check.in (one of the services I run through Midwestern Mac) is holding a simple contest: leave a comment on the blog post Contest - Win a RØDE smartLav!, and you're entered to win a Rode smartLav microphone, to which I gave five stars in my review.

I'm at the hospital this week, so I'll be unable to answer many emails, reply to comments, or post any new content. The spam hammer is still running, though, so you spammers out still won't get any mercy!

Please spare a prayer for me, as I still don't know what's wrong, but did get to experience some amazing new things, like using a toilet that slides out from under a sink, and curling up in a ball while someone withdrew brain juice from my spine!

From the press release announcing the lawsuit:

The Archdiocese of St. Louis and Catholic Charities of St. Louis are taking legal action against the federal government of the United States of America. During a press conference today, Archbishop Robert J. Carlson announced that a lawsuit challenging the legality of the HHS mandate was filed in court this morning.

Archbishop Carlson stated that the Church “had pursued every other imaginable option to correct this problem,” and added that, “Right now the future is unclear, and any scenario that forces us to violate our moral convictions is unacceptable. At the same time, any sce- nario that forces our St. Louis area hospitals, schools, and charities to close would be dev- astating to the many people employed and served by these institutions.”

See the press conference video, posted to the Archdiocese's YouTube channel:

I've been thinking about this lately—especially after the uproar having to do with the Georgetown student and Rush Limbaugh—but why haven't more people questioned the fact that the HHS mandate only provides free birth control, and not a hundred and one other drugs that are, in fact, much more helpful to the saving of lives? The Crescat, in fact, is also thinking about this (why free birth control...).

Birth control, let's face it, can be helpful for one of two goals:

1. Sexual relationships without 'consequences' (or, to put not too fine a point on it, women being able to have sex without pregnancy as a result).
2. Limiting the expansion of the human population (eugenics).

Either one of these two goals is not something I want my tax dollars supporting. Besides the fact that I'm morally opposed to all forms of artificial birth control, I'm also opposed to paying for other people's sexual gratification, and I'm extremely opposed to population control.

Since I've started working full-time as a web developer a few years ago, I've probably spent more than 8 hours every workday (and a few hours most weekends) sitting perfectly still at a desk, moving only my fingers, and occasionally my arms, to type, move a mouse, and drink something here and there.

With reports that working standing up isn't really all it's made out to be (you still need to move around, and you're moving pressure points from your lower back to your lower legs...), and other reports stating that it's more about periodic movement and stretching that will help with musculoskeletal fitness, I've been thinking more about ways I can force myself to move.