Greetings from a new member!

Greetings all,

I thought I'd say hi and tell you a little about myself seeing as I just joined last night.

I'm 22 (male) and was diagnosed with Crohns at 13. Over the last five years I've been trying different medications which all seem to work for awhile and then stop. My doctor had been telling me for awhile that we were running out of medications to try and will be looking at a bag in the future.

When my doctor first mentioned getting Infliximab infusions, I thought to myself "no way, I’d rather suffer then go to hospital all the time for infusions". How wrong I was, I loved going to hospital, the nurses were really nice, gave me time to catch up on reading and those first few times that I fainted just gave me some funny stories to tell people!  

After Infliximab infusions stopped working I moved on to Humira. I've always hated needles and felt ill at the idea of giving them to myself. Daunting at first, but now it’s not so bad! Especially seeing as I get to gross a few of my friends out who hate needles just as much as I do.

After Humira stopped working, I was told to seriously consider getting a bag. Originally I thought I'd rather just take tonnes of loperamide and be on prednisone and deal with the consequences later on down the track. But now, I'm booked in to have my large intestines removed and get a permanent bag in 4 weeks... and I'm actually kinda excited about it! (I have a few questions and worries though, but I'm sure you guys will help to answer them in due time). 

*Sorry I have had to remove your signature.  Please go into control panel and modify your signature.  We have folks as young as 13 on the forums and must be respectful to all.  Please change it to "stuff" happens.  Sorry!*

I'll post my questions in the appropriate places soon, but for now I’m just happy that I’ve finally found a Crohns forum that actually has a lot of members, posts and interesting discussions going on!

Just a little Warning:

I've been told my (facebook) comments are like emails, and my emails are like essays. There is some truth to this; my largest email to date was a little over 3,000 words long and they are generally over a page long. They are usually really big as I just write down whatever comes to mind, but I’ll try to keep my comments on this discussion board pretty small for you guys.

Post Edited By Moderator (Nanners) : 1/4/2010 7:48:37 AM (GMT-7)

Hey thanks everyone! Hope your surgery goes well too LittleSisSmurf. I just had a quick look through that Ostomy forum and it looks great! I think I'm definitely going to be spending some time in there these next few weeks!

And yes I love that quote! Besides the relevance to my Crohn's, it's my way of saying how sometimes in life bad things happen and there is nothing that can be done about it. By accepting that '**** happens' it's allows me to better deal with it. 

*Sorry I had to edit your post, we have children as young as 13 on these forums and we have to be respectful of all, thanks for your understanding*

Post Edited By Moderator (Nanners) : 1/4/2010 7:45:59 AM (GMT-7)

Thanks everyone for welcoming me and the positive thoughts! This place will definitly be a great source of encouragement in the future!

The word in my quote that you find disrespectful is in fact perfectly acceptable here in Australia. Obviously what is considered acceptable language differs from country to country. I guess I'll just have to get used to the fact that this is a forum used and moderated by people from different countries and cultures who will have opposing views of what is acceptable or not.

I didn't change my quote in the signature as it would have lost its meaning. Plus a person can't change the wording of their 'favourite quote', as it would essentially not be their favourite quote anymore . So instead, I have removed the quote and put a link to a Wikipedia article about my quote in the signature instead. Hope this is acceptable??