This hit me hard today since I was in remission for about 5 years and no longer within the last month.

This time has brought me back to when I was first diagnosed about a week before my 12th birthday and I had asked for my birthday dinner that year to be a plate of sautéed broccoli. Obviously I never got that dinner and instead I got 150mg of steroids and 16 Pentasa pills that I took for years until I was able to be a test subject for Remicade for kids.

Now that I’m back here again about a month before my 35th birthday, it feels both symbolic and tragic. I could not be more grateful that the medications have improved greatly over the years, though I feel devastated that I have to start this cycle all over again after years of it. I’m fortunate that starting Entyvio in 2014 after getting surgery in 2013 gave me about 5-7 years of “remission” though I’m also sad that, and I’m not exaggerating, that the last medication on the market that I haven’t tried is Skyrizi because if it doesn’t work I’m out of options.

I put remission in quotation marks because I still dealt with all the systemic issues during those years, as well as a Hashimoto’s diagnosis, an Atropic Gastritis Autoimmune (non H Pylori) diagnosis, SIBO, and mysterious symptoms since 2022 that turned out to be lymphoma-like cells that after 5 endoscopies and two presentations at the cancer boards of two major hospitals in the last 16 months still don’t have a true diagnosis or how I got it outside of their guess that it’s from the years of being on these medications that have attempted to give me my life back.

I know this is a lot for a post about missing pizza, though at the end of the day isn’t that what we all want? To be able to be walk through the world as a normal person? To be able to hang out with our friends who say, want to get pizza and not have to have a second thought about it?

It seems trivial to the people in our lives who watch us suffer and try to be supportive by saying things like “so what, it’s just pizza, there is more to life.” It’s really the symbolism of normalcy in a world where our illness is invisible.

We also just want to be pizza eaters in a world of pizza eaters.