NARRATIVE – For a day, our journalist slipped into the skin of a patient suffering from ulcerative colitis. A disturbing experience…
For once, I’m going to tell you about myself. Or more precisely, share with you a day spent in the skin of a person suffering from a (not so) rare and extremely debilitating disease, ulcerative colitis, one of the two chronic inflammatory bowel diseases with Crohn’s disease . Between them, these diseases affect 250,000 people in France and are characterized by inflammation of part of the digestive tract. Result: intestinal lesions, diarrhea, abdominal pain and even lesions of the anus. These “IBDs”, as doctors call them, evolve through inflammatory flare-ups of extremely variable duration and frequency, which alternate with phases of remission. But they are poorly apprehended by caregivers and those around them, who do not understand the discomfort they cause. That’s why I agreed to participate in the interactive program “In their Shoes” developed by the Takeda laboratory. A dive into everyday life…