One of the ironic characteristics of Crohn’s Disease is that the sickness it causes me is quite likely partially because my immune system is too strong. I had never really stopped to think about this. I had always thought I got as sick as anyone else. Headaches, sometimes Migraine? Check! Stomach pain, tube grief, and general related malaise? Check! But when I stop and think: I don’t get a lot of colds. I haven’t had the flu since I was a small child. I can’t remember the last time I had a fever. I don’t get traveler’s diarrhea and I don’t get food poisoning. My illnesses tend to be self-created and self-contained, not infectious. I won’t say I never get sick, but it hasn’t been a common thing.

Thanks to Remicade, all this has changed! The bimonthly infusions are an immune suppressant. And it has worked! Gut pain: gone! Energy level: good! Overall health–oh. Crap.

About three weeks ago I woke up with a swollen gland the size of a peanut in my neck. Rock-hard and throbbing. Two days later I woke up with a sore throat. This led to a cold, which lasted a few days. A few days later, I woke up with another sore throat. This trended into an even nastier cold that moved into my ears, my chest, my snot valves. The second cold laid me low for days and days.

On one day I was heading to a community lunch even with Aileen and I said to her: “I made a mistake on my way here in the car. I blew my nose. Now I can’t hear out of my left ear.”

“Hasn’t something like that ever happened to you?” she asked.

“No!” I said, something dawning on me…

“It’s something that happens to regular people when they get sick.”

And as such it’s a new world for a certain extent. The multi-day leaking and snorking and misfired sleep and drag-ass malaise. I’m sorry, world. Communicable diseases. Do not want. But my tubes: totally quiescent. I’m eating apples and popcorn and real honest-to-god vegetables and I haven’t exploded once!

I continue to convalesce. But it has been three weeks since I felt any sense of hale.