Meeting the Unicorn

I meet another girl with Crohns disease this week.  She also has an ostomy.  We met up near my work on Tuesday and we meet near her house on Thursday (both public places since we meet on the internet). 

It was very refreshing and wonderful for both of us to actually meet someone else with such similar experiences.  We kept looking at each other as if the other one was a unicorn or some other mythical creature we had only read about in fairy tales.  I have never met another person with Crohns before, let alone and ostomy, and it was nice to find her to be so regular and normal.  It made me have more faith that when people meet me, I seem regular and normal to them too.  I have never been sure of how it must feel on the other side of this. 

What struck us both was that neither one of us seemed sick to the other one, although we know from talking to each other that we are both going through some things right now with our health, we wouldn’t be able to tell from looking. 

It also struck me how similar our experiences, not only with this disease but in our lives, have been.  Although I believe that this disease was always with me, I have often wondered if perhaps I hadn’t had certain emotional and environmental triggers in my life, if the disease may never have presented itself at all.  Of course, I will probably never know for sure if the stress in my childhood, or my eating disorders triggered my disease, but it is something I think about. 

You never really know how you are supposed to deal with a disease, or how others would feel or what they would do in your situation.  I was in and out of the hospital a lot last year, and sometimes I felt very weak willed for having to go back in.  Then one day I asked the ER staff if they saw many people come through because of Crohns disease and they told me that people with Crohns have to be admitted to the ER all of the time.  Knowing that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t “just deal” with the pain all of the time made me feel sort of free in a way.  It wasn’t just me.  I wasn’t weak, and I wasn’t alone.

As you can imagine, actually meeting someone who had been through things I have been through with this disease and had felt the same ways I have felt, had an even stronger impact on me than hearing about people like me from the ER staff.  Hearing my new friend tell me about her surgeries and her pain made me see her as strong, and it helped me to see how strong I have been too.  Although we have both gone down our own path with this disease, it was kind of amazing to realize that there was someone out there who was like me.

It was an added bonus that my new friend seems like a very nice person and someone who I would want in my life, sick or healthy.  I hope that she and I stay friends for a long time.  I have lots of supportive people in my life and I am thankful for every single one of them, but sometimes it is nice to just sit down and talk to someone who has been where I have been.  Sometimes I think I just need to be face to face with another unicorn.