From Crohn's Advocate Magazine - A Lighter Look at Crohn's.
Hello friends. My name is Ben and I've had Crohn's Disease since 1997 when papa Crohn made digesting kind of hard. Ironically I was kind of an overweight kid in High School and losing 30 pounds in a month was actually kind of nice.
And if you laughed at that, Good. If you didn't, try. Laughing about Crohn's is incredibly therapeutic and I'll never forget how I found this out.
I was 23 years old, dealing with a nasty flare, and was doing stand-up in a small club near Columbia University. On this particular night I was totally bombing and as my mind went blank a letter I had received popped into my head. In it my insurance was declining payment for a recent colonoscopy on the grounds that ‘It wasn't a necessary procedure’, and still baffled by how anyone could think a colonoscopy was ever elective I decided to open up to the audience. “Do they think I was sitting around really bored one day being like, 'You know what, I haven't seen the inside of my own rectum in awhile and I got six thousand dollars just layin’ around, what say we go and get probed!?." The audience exploded with laughter. Crohn’s, as it turned out, could be funny.
That night changed how I look at my disease. In that one moment I had communicated to a room-full of strangers that I had a digestive disease and in a certain light, my digestive disease was hilarious. Never again would I let it scare me into silence when the truth was funnier than all the other jokes I had actually spent time writing.
Since that day I've made it my mission to get people to communicate through humor. The worst thing you can do is to crawl inside of yourself because you think you can't talk about what's happening with you, especially when it might be some grade A material. Is there anyone who can beat us at a farting contest?! No. And I got the story to prove it.
So try and allow the funny to flow, it's been put there for a reason. If you find the guts to make jokes about yours I promise you people will listen. Heck, you might even get a laugh or two. Sure worked for me.
