Monday, June 30, 2014

Diary of a Crohn’s Flare: The Vacation Begins



Back in January, my wife scheduled us for a family vacation.  That vacation started on Friday 6/12 and 6/23.  That means it started 2 days after my release from the hospital :O.

While in the hospital and every time I spoke with my doctor, I mentioned these plans to get his assessment of whether he thought it was OK for me to do and whether I should observe any special restrictions regarding my abscess, Crohn’s, or anything else.

The doctor cleared all vacation activities, even going to the beach and swimming in the ocean (despite having aspirated the abscess).  He felt that everything would be healed up by the time I got to Florida (where my vacation was).

On Friday we spent 16 hours preparing for, packing, and driving.  My wife drove most of the way but I did a total of about 4 hours of driving.  I ended up in moderate pain most of the day and took ½ pain pill to help with that about half way through the day which disqualified me from doing any driving after that.  I wasn’t able to eat much dinner because I experienced the full & bloated feeling that sometimes occurs with this flare.

We spent about 8 hours traveling on Saturday.  I drove about 2 hours and my wife drove the rest.  Once again, I had moderate pain through the day and ended up taking a ½ pain pill to make myself more comfortable.  By the time we got to the vacation house, we were all pretty tired.  Despite that, it wasn’t hard to convince the kids to unpack and prepare the place for our week’s stay.  Some of the kids spent time walking around that night but I took it easy.

The next day, I spent about 20 minutes riding a bike and an hour at the beach.  I spent most of the rest of the day lounging in the rental house just relaxing.

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