The annoyed and exhausted gf of a crohns victim

well glad you posted here to ask

My main question is, is it possible to be completely confined to your home and unable to work for 3 consecutive years due to crohns?

yes it's possible, especially if he has had crohn's disease all this time through his life and it hasn't been diagnosed and treated(with surgeries or medication) yet.

I would like to know like I stated before if the pain can really be this bad?

yes it can be totally paralyzing, i've heard it described as being worse than giving birth by women who have had kids and who have crohn's or ulcerative colitis.

Also, he might be using "stomach pains" as a catch-all explanation for you to avoid having to try to explain exactly what the real problems are / how he really feels to you, because maybe he's embarrassed by them or doesn't want to talk about it -- or maybe he doesn't even know how to put it into words without it sounding like he's just being lazy, because he doesn't know X or Y is a symptom of crohn's. Crohn's can come with a wide variety of systemic/body-wide symptoms like "mental fog", or feeling like you feel when you have the flu, like an untraceable feeling of just "bad", you would like to go out and do things and not be sick, but you just are sick. Your body is going through a process of immune response when you have the flu and it makes you sick, same is true of crohn's disease, only crohn's is caused by abnormal/unnecessary immune response - so basically the body mistakenly thinking it needs to fight itself and attacking itself (specifically in the GI tract is where the malfunction happens, but the immune response and symptoms from it can be all encompassing).

it's also common for crohn's disease to come with iron deficient anemia and "malabsorption", which is where the intestines are so damaged by crohn's disease and inflammation/scarring that your body isn't absorbing enough nutrients from the foods you eat, so obviously you're not going to be able to function like a normal healthy person because you're borderline malnourished. I was like that for years until I had surgery.

if he has crohn's disease, it can get better and worse. maybe he will get on a medication or have a surgery and get better for the next X years or decades. It's difficult to explain how life-altering it can be. The symptoms can be extreme. But until the symptoms are controlled with treatment, just imagine having the flu ALL the time (sometimes worse, sometimes better), you could learn to live with it, but you aren't going to be going out and doing things if you don't need to. If your mom will pay your rent, you're not going to go to work, because you're just sick and that's reality. If he has a serious illness and didn't know what it was, maybe he was just scared and didn't want to go to the doctor because he didn't want to be told he had cancer or something. I have crohn's and I almost died because I avoided the doctor for years, even after my intestines perforated (which can kill you) and I was in such bad pain that I couldn't even walk or move myself - I still tried to avoid going to the hospital or doctor. Eventually when I realized I was only getting sicker I went to the hospital and was diagnosed with crohn's disease.

you get better and worse and try to appreciate any time when you're not in pain from it, but then you're worrying about it and waiting for the pain to come back. It's a super bad disease to go untreated.

He tells me that the pain is incredibly crippling and limits his quality of life.

but yeah that sounds about right. It could improve if he gets on a medication that works or has surgery. This is why people undergo surgeries like complete removal of their colons or portions of their intestines and have an ostomy (pooping into a bag on your stomach) - because the pain and problems in your bowels are so extreme that you can't live life normally. Anyway I had surgery and take a chemotherapy medication for crohn's now and I avoid relationships because I don't want to put anyone in your position.

/r/CrohnsDisease Thread