Skip to content

Here's the 411 on IBD

Rachel Chisholm manages her Crohn's disease while balancing a full-time job and life as a graduate student
RachelChisholm
Ten years after she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, Sudbury's Rachel Chisholm has decided to share her experience to help others who may have received a more recent inflammatory bowel disease diagnosis. Supplied photo.

Ten years after she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, Sudbury's Rachel Chisholm has decided to share her experience to help others who may have received a more recent inflammatory bowel disease diagnosis.

Chisholm is Laurentian University's director of alumni relations, and said she was inspired to write a blog post about how to handle daily stress and inflammatory bowel disease after returning to school to complete a master's degree.

The blog post was also inspired by the IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) scholarship she received from the pharmaceutical company AbbVie to help with her studies.

“I really didn't do it right in undergrad. I took on too much and my health suffered for it,” she said.

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disease of the digestive tract, and symptoms can include abdominal pain and diarrhea, sometimes bloody, and weight loss. 

Stress from school or other parts of daily life can lead to debilitating flare-ups.

In her blog post, Chisholm recommends students with an inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's and colitis prioritize their time and complete important tasks first to avoid stress.

She also recommends students take a break or nap if they need to, and build a daily routine that can help ease their stress.

Like many of the one in 150 Canadians who have an inflammatory bowel disease, Chisholm said it took years for her to get a proper diagnosis.

When she first started having symptoms in her late teens, Chisholm said she approached her family doctor, but it took six years before she had a colonoscopy.

Once she had the colonoscopy, doctors told her immediately that she had Crohn's disease.

“There was no doubt in their mind,” she said. “If I had been put on medication six years earlier, maybe I would have had a different outcome in my life.”

Although she changed her diet and took medications to control the disease, five years after her diagnosis, Chisholm had a severe flare-up that kept her in hospital for six weeks.

“My intestines had blocked themselves,” she said.

She also had tears in her small intestine – called fistulas – that created a passageway to her appendix.

That passageway meant food went directly to her appendix and made her ill.

Doctors had to remove 25 centimetres of her small intestine, and her appendix. Her recovery from the surgery kept her in bed for weeks.  

But with better time management, Chisholm said she has been able to reduce her stress levels, even as she completes a master's degree while working full-time at Laurentian.

She said she hopes the lessons she has learned can help others manage the disease.


Comments

Verified reader

If you would like to apply to become a verified commenter, please fill out this form.




Jonathan Migneault

About the Author: Jonathan Migneault

Read more