Running with my Crohn's-ies

Since my hospital stay in August of 2017, I've seen my Gastroenterologist, Dr. Johnson, about once every 3 months. My last appointment was in March. I'd been on weekly (as opposed to bi-weekly) Humira for a little over 2 months at that point, and although not entirely gone, my Crohn's symptoms had felt like they were lessening. I use my Humira app to keep track of symptoms, which is very helpful in my conversations with Dr. Johnson. Saturdays are my injection days (thus the big circle)... any day with a little blue dot under the number is a day that I logged a symptom. I may have missed a day or two, but for the most part had kept up with logging symptoms. 3 days out of a month seemed like a good start, since the goal with Humira is remission within 3 months of starting. But I wasn't going to sugarcoat it with Dr. Johnson... I was still having symptoms. I experience the occasional sharp pain in my guts. Sometimes there's cramping, followed by an urgency to ...

March is the 'official' start of the race season in these parts, since the weather is finally reaching the point where your throat and lungs won't sear from breathing in air that's too cold... so as opposed to the 15° weather in January, we're up to a balmy 30°! We had pretty decent weather for most of the O'Races, a series of 4 St. Patrick's Day-themed 5ks in mid-March. Besides being a fun set of races, if you run in all 4, the medals you earn at each run come together to form some seriously sweet bling. The medals in past years include coins that formed a pot of gold, the flag of Ireland, a map of Ireland, and a 4-leaf clover... this year we were running for a pretty sweet Celtic knot. Kicking it off on Saturday, March 9th was the O'Shenanigans 5k, in Southington. It was a bright and breezy day, and it made for a beautiful start to the running season. The O'Shenanigan's race is the only one of the O'Races that doesn't have the name...