The Shame

The Shame of telling anyone, even my parents, motivated me to hide my disease for as long as I did.

Finally, sometime around Christmas of my eighth grade year, the truth came tumbling out.

I don't remember exactly what the straw that broke the camel's back was...probably normal 13-year-old stress. Maybe a bad grade on a science test, a poor performance in a basketball game, a boy at school hadn't return my undying affection. Who knows? Whatever it was - it resulted in me instigating a fight with my mother - the way all teenage daughters do when they are pissed off at the world.

And that was it. In the course of a five minute argument, I managed to confess my deepest, darkest, secret to my mother...There was blood in my poop.

My mother, who has become my best friend over the years, says she believes she saw signs of the disease sooner. We just didn't know what we were looking at. I hope that one day Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn's, and all their ugly sister-diseases will be discussed as openly as other illnesses that plague our society. Maybe if we had known what the symptoms were, we could have sought out help sooner. Maybe if I knew what the symptoms were, I wouldn't have hid the disease for as long as I did.

Even now, after the surgeries, people - even those I consider friends - will say "I didn't even know you were sick!" when I explain why I was just recently in the hospital.

A convincing smile. A convincing lie. That is all it takes to hide The Shame.