Performance in Autoimmune

For those with autoimmune diseases, it is sometimes hard to have a steady job, let alone participate in activities that depend on your performance every day.

For me, this comes by the way of theatre. For others, it may be athletics or music or something entirely different. You see, when your body is upset, it fights against you. If you are doing physical activities, your performance level is dependent on how well you can connect with your body. If your body doesn’t want to connect, or if it wants to hurt, you can’t necessarily control what it does.

Plus, with Crohn’s, there is always the possibility that you will have to use the restroom. At any time. Your life kind of becomes a symphony of restroom usage.

I once heard a story about an actor who was very sick. In order to keep herself from getting sick on her costumes (and not puke sick), she had to wrap herself in saran wrap. She soiled the saran wrap on stage, but it saved her outfits, and, she was able to perform like nothing was wrong. As they say, “The show must go on!”

That story absolutely terrifies me. However, it also is a good analogy for what it feels like to have urgency. You are wrapped in hot, sticky saran wrap that you have to get off, but you can’t always quite get the chance to take off the saran wrap. So, it just keeps getting more and more annoying until you either forget it is there or it burns you and you get sicker.

Now, I don’t have that big of a complication with my Crohn’s; but, this urgency during acting is common. Acting is added stress, and stress makes Crohn’s flare.

So, could extreme bowel problems be in my future? I pray dearly that it is not.

My point here is: when you live with an autoimmune disease, doing jobs or activities that are time dependent is a toss-up. If they are pulled off, that’s pretty cool...because, sometimes, we are in a race against our intestines’ time-clock. On the contrary, sometimes Crohn’s has pushed me to do things more urgently because I know that my condition could change at any time.