Update: Tonight I get to try French fries! My doctor approved. I can't wait!
The transition in January from being taken care of at home by my parents to returning to college life was difficult at first. Besides my mom calling several times a day to see how I was (of course, I would always say the same thing: not well), I was on my own in managing my disease. I had four friends who knew the details of UC because, understandably, the symptoms made me feel embarrassed. Obviously, I've gotten over that! And I assume that if you are reading this, you aren't going to think of me differently afterwards. I had my friend Ghislaine who herself had the disease and then surgery, two mutual friends who already knew the details from being friends with Ghislaine and a friend with Crohn's. Other than that, I would just tell people I "didn't feel well." While that may sound lonely, the fact that people didn't know how sick I was meant that being with other people was an opportunity to be distracted by other subjects and helped me feel more normal. We couldn’t talk about details because people didn’t know them.
I had a medical single with my own bathroom, which was also lonely but absolutely necessary. Honestly, I was doing any potential roommate a favor by sparing them. I took a more assertive stance towards being sick in school, working the Academic Resource Center to get medical accommodation letters for my professors. I could try to be normal socially, but trying to pretend to be normal academically was plain silly. With a series of letters from my doctor in Berkeley, the letters of accommodation notified my professors that I might need to leave class or arrive late because I didn't feel well, that I felt ill unpredictably, and that I had permission to use the Academic Resource Center for midterms or finals with stop-time if I wanted to. That meant that I could leave a testing room and not lose any time allotted if I needed to spend some time in the bathroom palace.
While I never actually used special testing or missed a class because I always tried to be as normal as possible, knowing that my professors knew what was going on made me much more relaxed. Even though every day getting to class was a struggle, I always made it. I will admit that there were a couple classes when I arrived in tears. I wanted to be normal like everyone else and not have to think about what I had to think about. I didn't want to be that girl who left class every class and made a disruption. I often counted down in 20 or 30-minute intervals - I would tell myself, in 20 minutes, I can leave and throw up. 20 minutes later, I would tell myself that in just 20 more minutes, I can leave and throw up. That way I could make it through a class. When class was over, I bolted to the elevators to get to the particular floor of whatever building I was in where I knew there would be no line to the bathroom. I basically planned my days around routes between bathrooms in buildings. I rarely went off campus and took the metro once the entire semester. Public transportation is a UC nightmare - just think, how accessible is the bathroom? It sounds bad, and it was, but it didn’t seem that bad at the time. I did what I could not to think about more than the immediate. Sometimes I became frustrated with my limitations because college is so brief and so special, but I would remember that I was just lucky to be at Georgetown at all.
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| I brought my flags back to decorate my room in Georgetown! |
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| One of the few times I ventured off campus, to the Kennedy Center, with my friend George, who knew what was going on. |
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