...And So I Fight (Short Story – Nonfiction)

I fight. Every day. Through clenched teeth and roaring stomachs. Through sharp pains and dull, yet powerful aches. Through the visible and the invisible pains that surround me. I fight. Because what else is there to do?

I stare at the food on the plate in front of me and wonder if I should eat it. It’s almost a subconscious question that I’m barely even aware of at this point, but it’s still there nevertheless. I question if it’s worth it. I question if it will help me more than it will hurt me. I question what I have to do later that afternoon, and if I eat what is in front of me – will I still be able to do what needs to be done?

On a daily basis I question my body’s ability to make the right decisions. To eat something and keep it down. To eat something without being in so much pain that I can’t leave my couch. To eat something and have it fill me with nutrition rather than a pain that I’ve come to compare to being kicked and punched in the stomach repeatedly for hours.

I sit behind my desk at work, or on a desk in front of a class because, well, it’s more comfortable than standing. But not just for my feet. It allows me to relax – as much as I’m capable of relaxing. It allows me to hunch over and apply pressure to the gurgling monster inside of me, while still teaching whatever lesson I managed to muster up that day.

I spend hours at work with a smile plastered on my face. I stay late after school making small talk with other teachers in the hallway, telling them that I’m fine when they ask how I’m doing. I get as much of my work done as possible, because as soon as I get home, the mask falls – and I can no longer contain the pain.

Every day is a new battle. And each day I manage to fight through it – but not without questioning, every once in awhile, whether or not I’ll actually make it through this time.

When I was twelve years old I stopped asking these questions. I gave up. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that something that was supposed to help me was causing me so much pain, so I stopped. I stopped eating. I drank water, but that was about it. For eight months.

My parents questioned if I was anorexic or bulimic – unable to understand my pain, because it was a pain they could not see. They brought me to doctors and to therapists – but they only threw labels at things they couldn’t understand. They wanted to blame trauma and bad relationships. They wanted to blame me and my past for something I had no control over.

I’d run to the bathroom for hours after “eating” a meal, because I knew even one bite was going to end up causing me enough pain to result in a fetal position for the rest of the night. My parents refused to let me leave the table until I had finished eating, often hours after everyone else had already left the room. I sat alone. In the dark. Debating whether to eat in order to make my parents happy, or to avoid the food that would cause me to be in pain for the foreseeable future. I tried to find a middle ground. I stuffed the food into my mouth, left the room, and spit it out in a trashcan in my bedroom hoping they wouldn’t find out. But they did. That was when they tried shoving food down my throat. It didn’t go over well.

Most of the eight months occurred during the summer that followed the sixth grade. I was too exhausted to move, to wake up, to be a person. Most people tell me it’s not possible to go eight months without eating – because if I did, I’d be dead. And I promise you ... I wasn’t far from it.

I spent most of my time sleeping, constantly being woken up to join my family in another room, where I would drag myself and then promptly fall back asleep since I had absolutely no energy to even keep my eyes open. I was dragged to doctors where I had to force multiple bottles of liquid chalk down my throat. Sure – I can’t stomach eating anything, but chalk sounds appetizing, so why not?

One doctor listened. One doctor paid attention to every pain and ache – every wince that I tried to hide and every scream that I internalized. She gave me answers. She gave me a diagnosis. She told me there was no cure, but it was treatable. She sent me off with medications and monthly blood tests. She kept my body alive, but I no longer had hope. I was no longer healthy. I was no longer the carefree twelve-year-old that only had to worry about which friends she’d be inviting to her birthday from her new school. She changed everything. And I hated her and her cold personality for all of it.

I have Crohn’s Disease. An inflammatory bowel disease. An autoimmune disease. My immune system overworks by trying to kill itself. It views everything as a foreign object that needs to be destroyed. Food included. Me included. This disease causes my intestines to be inflamed, irritated by any food that passes through – to be ulcerated, allowing holes to form in the lining of my intestines – to have strictures, restricting any food from passing through and forcing it all to go back up the way it entered. I have a disease that fights to control my life on a daily basis – but I fight back.

When I was twelve years old, I was told that I have an incurable disease that will make my life hell, and while no one knows what causes it, it is triggered by stress. Great. I live a high-stress lifestyle. I took seven classes in one semester in high school when I was only allowed five. My resumé for entering college included five pages worth of extracurricular activities. I worked six jobs every summer growing up, because I’d get bored with just one. I took 23 credits per semester in college when the dean tried to cap me off at nineteen. I teach three classes, run three clubs, teach the SAT prep course after school, and manage to have a second job outside of school despite never leaving the building before 4:00pm. I like to be busy. For me, free time results in being bored, so I stay busy. And yes, it’s stressful. And while this works best for my mentality, it doesn’t mean that it’s been the best for the rest of my health.

I used to think that I knew best. I thought that if I felt okay, then that meant I didn’t need the medications that doctors were telling me to keep taking. I didn’t want to keep taking them. I was twelve and the thought of taking dozens of pills every day just wasn’t something that I wanted to live with for the rest of my life. So I stopped taking them. I waited until my parents left the room, I tiptoed over to the trashcan, dumped the pills quietly into the trash, and quickly placed a napkin on top of them so that they wouldn’t be easy to discover. I didn’t want my parents to discover the truth. Deep down, I knew what I was doing was wrong. But that didn’t stop me. I kept doing it. For weeks. Until my doctor called my parents asking if I had stopped taking my medication. Apparently my blood tests were able to determine what I wasn’t: I was quickly declining and if I didn’t start taking my medication again, I would be right back where I had started – clutching my stomach and asking God – a god I’m not sure I even believe in – why me?

So I started taking them again, and have been since. Over a decade worth of medications have built up in my body. But sometimes they decide they’re no longer the right call for me. Sometimes they stop working. Sometimes my health deteriorates so quickly that I lose thirty pounds in a month because my system doesn’t understand how to absorb nutrients from the food I’m eating. Sometimes I’m forced to spend months and years waiting for a new medication to work – stuck waiting, in pain, with no answers or quick fixes.

Every year there are new challenges. New foods to avoid, new medications to try, new coping strategies to employ. And it will never end. I have a disease that tries its damndest to control my life. It tries to get my to quit the things I love. To stop participating in the activities that make me happiest. To stop socializing with the people I have left who truly try to understand what I’m going through. To stop being me.

But I decided a long time ago not to let it win. Not to let it control me. Not to let it get in the way of who I want to become. Instead I use it. I use it to help me understand others. I use it as a way to empathize with those that have more going on than what shows on the surface. To understand that not all emotions or illnesses or experiences are visible. That the person walking down the street in a rush might appear angry or distraught at first glance, but the reasons behind the first glance are endless.

To this day people try to discredit my illness. They tell me I’m lucky to have a condition that makes it so easy to lose weight. They tell me that if I just ate a healthy diet, I’d be fine – despite the fact that healthy food is what causes the most pain for me. They tell me that they know exactly what I’m going through because they spent the last twenty-four hours with a stomach bug. But they don’t know. They can’t know. They can’t even relate – because this condition is unrelatable.

I have a disease that manifests itself differently in every person who has it. Some people can tolerate certain foods that send others to the hospital. Certain people respond well to medications that cause allergic reactions in others. Some people benefit from exercise when others struggle to get out of bed due to the pain. I don’t understand anyone else’s pain better because of my condition. I can’t read minds or prescribe medications or tell people what will work best for them. I can tell them what I’ve been through. I can share my story. I can help open the eyes of others to the fact that maybe that rushed and angry person on the sidewalk might need the benefit of the doubt, because maybe – just maybe – they’re dealing with something that we cannot even fathom understanding.

This is why I won’t wish away my condition. This is why I’m grateful for the things I’ve learned from it and the person I’ve become because of it. This is why I write about it on a regular basis. This is why I became a teacher – because trying to relate, understand, and show others that they are not alone in their experiences is the entire reason I keep fighting.

Hear Me Out (3/6/19)

I find myself fighting
from within
struggling to get out
yelling to be heard

I find myself clawing
scratching at the
pain
punching my way out

I find myself suppressed
pushed down
hushed
told to be quiet

I find myself caught
needing to be known
seeking to be seen
hoping to be helped

a cry catches in my
throat –
well ... your throat
because I am you
I am within you
no matter how much
you deny it

Invisible or Not, Here I Am (2/14/19)

it can't be seen
or viewed by others
it only exists by word of
mouth
           – yours
so it's your word
against their eyes.
The eyes that cannot see
what you describe
How can you expect them
to believe
in what cannot be seen?
You can't.
You can only hope.
But hope can only go so far.

You'd think your word
would be enough
when coupled with your
pain
experience
and situation
but none of that matters
when none of it can be
seen

but I promise you –
just because it's invisible
doesn't mean it's not there
I mean
just look at me.

Unrelatable (Short Story - Nonfiction)

1-10 has never been never my scale. The unnerving pain that either felt like sharp needles digging deep into my stomach, millions of knots filling it, or sharp shooting pains that resembled what I believed it would feel like to be shot in the stomach could never be restricted to a 1-10 pain scale. Clearly 1-100 wouldn’t be realistic either; so I settled on 1-20 for most scenarios.

Crohn’s Disease belongs to a group of conditions known as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and is a chronic inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract. IBD incorporates both Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, which are two entirely different conditions – although they are often lumped together. They differ depending on what part of the gastrointestinal tract they affect. For example, Ulcerative Colitis affects the colon (large intestine) and Crohn’s Disease affects the small intestine. Most websites that take the time to define these two diseases specify where in the gastrointestinal tract the inflammation occurs – but this is where the descriptions get tricky. Crohn’s Disease is different for just about every individual. While the most common cases are called Ileocolitis and Ileitis, which both affect the ileum (the last portion of the small intestine), there are at least three other forms of the disease, and each form has a different list of symptoms that might not be entirely accurate for each individual living with it.

March through October. Roughly eight long months of scrambling parents, running to bathrooms, and applying as much pressure to the upper left part of my stomach as possible. No one knew what was going on, but no one wanted to know more than my parents. Watching me dart from the table and run to the bathroom in fear of getting sick each time I ate any type of food, my parents pondered the thought of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa. Looking back on it, they’ve told me that they were just trying to be realistic – considering every possibility since they couldn’t figure out what was going on. The doctors weren’t helping much in the beginning either.

In August I weighed myself for the last time during my diagnosis process. I was at the lowest I can remember ever being: 77 pounds at age twelve. My dad tends to describe this summer in a few different ways, but his favorite always being that he was able to nearly wrap his hand around my upper arm twice. I hadn’t had food pass through my mouth in months. Food hurt me. My body saw it as the enemy and changed my perception of it from something I needed to survive to something I needed to avoid at all costs.

Gastroduodenal Crohn’s Disease. This is basically what I have. It’s a form of the disease that involves the stomach and the duodenum, which is the first ten inches of the small intestine. Typically, people living with this type of Crohn’s Disease suffer from nausea, weight loss, loss of appetite, and if the narrow segments of the bowel are obstructed, they experience vomiting as well. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

This being said, if anyone looks up Crohn’s Disease for themselves, the typical symptoms are: diarrhea, fever and fatigue, abdominal pain and cramping, blood in stool, mouth sores, reduced appetite, and weight loss. My symptoms? No desire to eat, skeletal appearance due to drastic weight loss, surging and writhing abdominal pain and cramping, inability to function in my daily life due to loss of energy, depression, and the mouth sores that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to forget. The mouth sores that are often associated with Crohn’s Disease are basically ulcers inside your mouth, similar to the ones that would be found throughout your gastrointestinal tract. Fun, right?

On top of all of that, Crohn’s Disease is an autoimmune disease. It chronically fights itself. It views itself, food, and medications as foreign objects and tries to fight against them, eventually destroying itself. Because my immune system overreacts and works too hard, I now no longer have one. If I move away from you when you cough or sneeze on the bus, in a class, or at a party – don’t take it personally. I can only fight myself; I can’t fight off you.

My mom’s voice would often wake me up at 3:00 in the afternoon. The soothing hums would waft through the open doorway of my bedroom. This had become a regular occurrence. She’d wake me up in fear of me sleeping the entire day away and then not sleeping later that night, which was never actually a problem for me. Six months of not having anything to eat and my body was rebelling. It had no energy and was punishing me by not allowing me to live. She’d wake me up and invite me out into our living room to join the rest of my family to watch television – or something of the sort.

I’d drag myself out of bed, force my body down the hall limb by limb until I arrived at the smaller of the two couches in my living room. Dropping myself onto the worn-out leather cushions, it was a matter of minutes before I was asleep again. That summer, a lot of people told me I’m cute when I sleep.

There is no known cause of Crohn’s Disease. Recent research has been suggesting that the cause might be due to hereditary, genetic, and/or environmental factors – some research is even suggesting that it is the interaction amongst all of these factors that contribute to the development of the chronic, inflammatory condition. My father has always had stomach problems. He’s borderline for the diagnosis. Basically, he has all the symptoms but receives none of the treatments. Two of my aunts have it as well.

Another interesting feature of Crohn’s Disease that seems to be causing many scientists and doctors to be scratching their heads, is the fact that this disease is more prevalent in a specific Jewish population from Eastern Europe known as Ashkenazi Jews. Something to do with inbreeding or incest within ancestors. I’m not entirely sure, but I am Jewish, so I suppose this affects me one way or another. So despite there being no known cause for the disease, scientists are attempting to focus on genetics and hereditary qualities. In the meantime, they only seem to be able to diagnose people based on symptoms and signs of inflammation.

Nine years ago, when I was twelve years old, my doctors were still trying to figure out what was going on inside me. Once they determined it was some form of inflammation, they started me on Prednisone – a steroid. This medication has saved my life various times, but this first one is the most prominent in my mind. After a couple of months on these pills everyone could see a difference. Granted, I still wasn’t gaining any weight, but I had more energy than I knew what to do with. I’d wake up incredibly early in the morning during my winter vacation from middle school, make my mom coffee (five cups), empty the dishwasher, finish the laundry that we had probably put in the night before, mop the floors, scrub the counters, dust the television, and sit down to start my book reports that had been assigned for the break. I remember that vacation more vividly than the entire summer I was sick. My dad was ripping up the carpet throughout our house and self-installing a wooden floor. It looked great, but because of the work involved in setting wooden floors, all of our living room furniture was in our kitchen. I remember jumping over couches and maneuvering my way around televisions and back again, just because I could. I had the energy for it. I could get up and walk without falling over and I could stay awake without someone constantly propping me up throughout the day.

After months of being on the steroids, I began to look like a chipmunk. Friends asked if I had had teeth pulled. People stopped saying I looked great. I had not only gained the weight back that I had lost, but I added to it. As much as the Prednisone saved my life, the teenage girl in me will always hate this medication for how it altered my body at a time when I was already self-conscious of my appearance.

The medication list for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases is constantly growing. I suppose this is a good thing, because it means that people are still researching and trying to discover new treatments – but in reality it’s because it’s necessary. When I was first diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, my doctors looked directly in the eyes of a naïve twelve year old, and told me that no one dies from the disease. Well, I say bullshit to that.  If those statistics are accurate, it’s only because no one was diagnosed with it at the time of their death. Had I gone on for another month or two of my life without eating, I would not be here right now. So, bullshit. There is no way that no one has ever died from Crohn’s Disease. Thanks a lot for trying to reassure younger-me, but you just made older-me angry instead.

Prednisone, Imuran, Mercaptopurine, Methotrexate, and Humira. Do these mean anything to you? They work to reduce inflammation and to return my body to a state of remission. At a point in my life, that didn’t mean anything to me. In fact, at one point after I had been on one for awhile, I decided on my own that I was healthy again and I didn’t need these medications anymore. I stopped taking them. I’d quietly throw each pill out every night and place a napkin or a tissue on top of it in the trash to make sure my parents never found out. But they did. Because I stopped being healthy. Months passed and my blood tests results began to decline drastically, and my doctor began following up to see if I was still taking my medicine. I wasn’t. But I tried to keep lying for awhile. I remember sitting on the brown, worn-out couch in between both of my parents the day that I finally told them. I never said anything. I just nodded my head when they asked. Tears rolled down my face, making a plop sound when they landed on the leather next to me.

X-rays, blood tests, upper GI (gastrointestinal) scans, endoscopies, colonoscopies, dye infusion scans – the examinations went on and on, because each test only reaches a certain part of a person’s body. My inflammation was and is in my duodenum. Endoscopies only reach into your stomach and colonoscopies don’t go much further than the beginning of your colon. Upper GI scans require the patient to drink Barium, a chalky liquid that is used to outline one’s entire digestive tract to make it easily viewable through special x-rays. I’ve had to drink this stuff twice. The first time it took me about three hours to get through one bottle (of the three I had to drink). I cried. It tasted awful, I was in an obnoxious amount of pain, and even my mom couldn’t help me feel better. What was worse is that none of these tests showed anything. Being poked and prodded for months did me no good, besides develop bruising up and down my arms and across my torso. I still had no answers. After months of testing, my doctor finally starting treating me. They diagnosed me without 100% proof of the disease, but based on my symptoms, they knew they had to act soon. And as a twelve-year-old, I couldn’t care less. I just wanted them to make the pain go away.

That summer. When no one knew what was going on with me. When no one knew what to do to help me. It was 95 (DEGREES) outside. I wore a sweatshirt. Baggy clothes were all that I owned. Pant sizes went down a bit, but I never got out of my pajama pants, so it didn’t seem to affect my wardrobe at all. Everything hung off of me as if I purposefully meant to buy them to be too big. It made me look sicker than I actually was. No one knew that was possible.

The majority of my life has been spent receiving suggestions from people who believe they understand and know better about what I’ve gone through and continue to go through.. Hearing comments of, “You look great!” when I’ve lost fifty pounds in a timespan of a month isn’t helpful. Having people suggest that I try to diet or eat differently and then maybe, just maybe, my stomach won’t have these “problems” anymore, isn’t something I can continue to nod along with for much longer. Being told that my face looked like I had my wisdom teeth pulled out just yesterday, when in fact I had been on seven months of corticosteroids to help stabilize my body and reduce the inflammation, just furthered the self-conscious thoughts that ran through my head on a day to day basis. “You’re so lucky! I wish I could lose weight that easily,” is possibly one of the worst comments I’ve received and it was met with a blank stare.

Going away to school, my parents had many worries when it came to my health. Telling my roommate about my pain scale only seemed to frighten her.

“Should I contact your mom?”

“Only if it’s really bad,” I told her.

“So on a 1-10 scale, when should I call her?”

“Not 1-10. More like 1-20. And when it’s over a 17. I can handle it up to a 17,” I explained. Last semester I hit a 17. But I didn’t tell her. Hiding it is what I’ve, inadvertently, been trained to do.

Crohn’s Disease is not a relatable condition. I could spend hours telling you about the pain that I’ve gone through and the specific moments that I remember, but the truth is – even other people with Crohn’s Disease won’t understand, because the condition truly is unique to each individual. I’m lucky: mine isn’t nearly as severe as many others that I’ve read about and met over the years. But the level of pain that I associate as my normal everyday experience cannot be compared to your two days of food poisoning. My normal might be someone else’s pain level of a 6 or a 7 on their 1-10 scale. But I have no way of knowing their interpretations of pain, either. All I know is that I spent my teenage years hugging trashcans and experimenting with (doctor-approved) medications and crying myself to sleep at night asking God – a God I’m not even 100% sure I believe is up there – “Why me?” because I truly did not understand why living meant having to endure so much pain.

It's Not An Excuse – Short Story

One pill destroys the pain. Just one to pop, and then it’s gone. It’s true what they say: it can all go away with the pop of a pill.

Everyone asked me to describe the torture. They asked me to describe it on a scale of one to ten. They told me they couldn’t help me unless I told them what I was feeling. So I told them I was feeling pain. What would a one mean? A tack in the sole of my foot? What about a ten? An anvil landing on my ribs? Yeah, definitely a ten.

It’s impossible to describe the pain that resonated throughout my silicone organs, so gentle and incapable of fighting the outside world.

How would they know if I was telling the truth anyway? If I told them my rating of my torture, that is. How can someone rate their pain anyway? Is it possible? Is it accurate? My rating could mean something entirely different than theirs. So what does a rating truly matter?

My perception is different than yours. That’s a fact. There are millions of sides of the topic, but no matter which point of view you take, this fact is true.

My experiences are mine and you can only merely observe what I go through – but even observations don’t give you the privilege to judge my adventures. You can’t claim I’m a goody-two-shows, a risk-taker, a neurotic mess, or a mentally deranged person just from a mere observation.

The five year monster that I’ve been fighting for a large portion of my life has come back to haunt me – but a mere pop of a pill seems to destroy the monster from within.

They suggested it awhile ago, but the side-effects were simply too obvious to the masked eye. I couldn’t do that to myself: not with Prom right around the corner. The last thing I wanted was for my face to resemble that of a blow fish; I decided to endure the pain.

Five years isn’t very long when comparing to a lifespan of one-hundred-ten, but a lot can happen within that small chunk of time. It all seems like a dream to me though. I guess it was, being as how I was asleep for the majority of it, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was real. The pain was real. The memories were real. And the monster survived.

My mother remembers it vividly. She wasn’t asleep at the time. She has memories of my structure and my pain; she witnessed everything she could except for the physical characteristics she couldn’t have felt had she wanted to – a want that would clearly classify a person crazy. I would never wish my pain or experiences on any other soul – not even for an understanding. Not even for a moment of time in the spectrum of life. Many people often claim that they wish they knew what I was going through, but not one of them could have truly ever meant such a statement. The truth behind an assertion as strong as this would be far more than they could ever bargain for.

I know there are far worse things in life. I know there’s hunger and animal abuse and oppression and poverty and genocide, but all of these can’t mask the pain I feel within. It can’t mask the tearing and shredding that my intestines are experiencing. Children in third world countries are dying from world hunger and poverty, but I’m dying because my system wants to believe it should.

Bacteria is meant to be rejected by the immune system, right? But food isn’t supposed to be considered a bacteria, so why does my system reject it? Why does it reject the nutrients and refuse my body its right to work properly?

My speech may seem vague and utterly metaphorical for a topic of such drastic measures, but that is due to the experiences I have encountered and the complete fact that none of them are truthfully explainable. I could spend days upon days explaining each horrific and horrendous day that I’ve encountered with my disease, but even after all of my descriptions, you’d still ask the most basic question: “How do you get nutrients?”

They don’t seem to understand. They don’t seem to realize that I don’t get nutrients. I don’t get food. I don’t ingest anything and I can’t digest anything. Depression ensues and all I can manage to do is fade away into oblivion and sleep my days and nights away while having medication after medication shoved down my throat.

Six years ago I had never experienced real pain. I had broken bones, sprained limbs, fallen down stairs, hit my head, dented walls, and kicked metal, but I had never experienced pain before the monster came to the surface within me just five years ago.

I couldn’t walk without stumbling; I couldn’t sit up straight without falling over; I couldn’t watch television without falling asleep; I couldn’t live my life without being a ghost that was hanging on by a thread.

Doctors claim that no one has ever died from this disease, but I don’t believe them. Another month or two and I wouldn’t be here writing this bland story about the knife that cut up my insides and left me to heal in a way no human being can without some form of aid – aid that “they” weren’t able to provide me with. Another month of two of being forced to starve and losing all forms of mass on my bones would have caused me to whither away into nothing more than a barely-breathing corpse ready for her coffin.

I have pictures to prove it, but even those cause doubts amongst the listeners. No one believes that I went through such pain at an age as young as twelve – even when many people experience pain even younger. They told me I was using it as an excuse. They told people that I was making it up. My “friends” disappointed me and walked away from me when I could have used a shoulder for support.

My body was bones. My stomach was a deflated whoopee cushion that had millions of punctured holes in it and would require help to be reflated. My intestines were shredded, and my life was no different than death.

My doctors eventually realized what was wrong, and they began helping me. The single pop of a microscopic pill and I had started to feel better. I was in remission. I was being healed. But this was five years ago.

Five years ago, I survived. Five years ago, I was able to live to tell the tale. Five years ago, I pushed the monster under my bed and gave it a good kicking until it was welded into the filthy carpeting. But that was five years ago.

It’s now 2011 and I’m now seventeen years old and the monster has returned. My intestines are deteriorating, sleep overwhelms me, and I strongly disagree when people tell me that no one has died from this disease.

I have Crohn’s Disease. It is incurable, I will have it for life, and my doctors are limited in what they can do for me. I have Crohn’s Disease: it’s not an excuse or a story for a passing grade. It’s my life and often my death. I have Crohn’s Disease, and that’s why I can’t rank my pain. I have Crohn’s Disease, and no one knows how I feel, because everyone perceives pain differently. I have Crohn’s Disease, and the only thing that can help me is the magical, microscopic pill that inflates my face.