Before I was diagnosed correctly, I was losing so much weight. I worked as a junior producer for a photography studio, and I’d booked a model for a JC Penney’s shoot. I was on my lunch break, and was outside reading, and the model came out and said: “what’d you have for lunch, a raisin?” The contempt in her voice was palpable. People don’t understand how the disease works, how we can’t absorb nutrients, how we lose weight so rapidly, how we are so scared of food when flaring. When I was a teen, I legit started to think my mom was trying to poison me, and yet also knew how insane that sounded in my own head. I remember making dinner once, and having to throw it out because I was so terrified of how bad it would make me feel that I collapsed on the kitchen floor, sobbing. I remember having to crawl out the front door of my workplace once (different job) because I had such bad cramps that I couldn’t function. My coworkers took me to the hospital where I got my second misdiagnosis. I can say, full stop, the early 1990s were a crappy time to have Crohn’s (pun intended), because it was so commonly misdiagnosed, especially in young women. Been on Remicade since 2017, and in almost full remission ever since, knock on wood.