“The symptoms didn’t start until I was seventeen. I was...

“The symptoms didn’t start until I was seventeen.  I was volunteering at a soup kitchen one day and I got such bad stomach pain that I had to sit down.  That’s when I learned about Crohn’s disease, which basically means that I have ulcerations in my intestine.  It’s pretty brutal.  Constant pain.  Sometimes I can’t get out of bed.  Other times I throw up blood.  Once I got so desperate that I tried to heal myself with a thirty-five day water fast.  It didn’t work, and by the end I was down to 95 lbs.  I’ve gone through a lot of depression because of the pain.  Honestly, if it wasn’t for my wife and kids, I might have ended it by now. It’s heartbreaking for my wife to see me go through it.  And it’s heartbreaking for me to put her through it.  I feel like I’m holding her back.  She’s so adventurous.  She loves dancing, and traveling, and going out, and exploring.  And I can’t do any of that.  We took a three-day trip to the mountains in Seattle and I spent the entire time in tears on the couch.  Same thing happened when we took the kids to Disneyland.  I just hate being the sick husband.  She has to pick up so much of the slack.  But we’ve been to marital counseling.  And I’ve told her all of this.  And she swears that she wouldn’t change a thing.  And that she loves me just how I am.  And that I’m not a burden.  I don’t know, man.  We’ve been through so much shit together.  I guess she just really loves me.”