The way I felt about the word “surgery” was almost the same way I feel about taking someone’s advice who told me to chain myself to the landing gear of an airplane just before it takes off.
Medication is the last line of defense before surgery, when it comes to the way Crohn’s disease is dealt with in modern medicine. Here, we’re going to throw drug after drug at you as long as they work, and when none of them work anymore we’re sorry but we are now required to cut you open and remove your disease temporarily.
I visited my gastroenterologist in December when it was suggested that I see a surgeon and consider a resective operation to treat my disease. It wasn’t until the following May that I finally went through with it, and that was because the upper portion of my small intestine had fused together and I could no longer eat without vomiting. I literally waited until I got to the point where I would have died without surgery, before finally admitting that I needed it.
