One of my most powerful experience has to have been... Well, when I went to the hospital. I’ve been three times. I can distinctly remember my mental state for each visit. I was borderline suicidal from this. From all the pain that I was going through. I was really really sad, I wanted to get out of my body. Now that I look back on it. Now that I'm processing it I realize that I was extremely out of my body. I was disassociating myself from my own body. I would look in the mirror sometimes and I wouldn’t recognize myself at all. My shoulder blades protruding through my chest, ribs easily seen through near translucent flesh, I was fading away. My pain felt as if someone had put a red hot iron inside my stomach and twisted. It got to the point that I couldn’t sleep or eat, all I could do was lay in bed and hope that it would pass. And it's difficult to function normally while bearing such extreme pain. I distinctly remember arriving at the E.R sobbing into my mom's shoulder, grasping my mom’s shirt as if the cotton would save me from the fire inside my chest. It got to a point that I was only living for my friends and not for myself.  I stayed in the hospital for 3 days and then I got to go home. While I was in the hospital they ran several tests to try and figure out what was wrong with me and the results showed that I had Crohn disease. Crohn's disease is an autoimmune disorder that affects my colon. It causes chronic inflammation and scar tissue formation inside my colon. There’s no cure. I was put on medication and my symptoms were under control for a while. Until March 2018, when I started vomiting almost every day, I couldn’t keep food down, and what I could get down just came out as diarrhea. I started losing weight rapidly and I was in so much pain I couldn’t sleep. My parents brought me to the hospital where I would stay for the next 5 days. That was hard, it felt like a loss of my dignity, the medication they gave me made me feel like my veins were on fire. I honestly don’t remember much from my stay, looking back it doesn’t feel entirely real. Almost like I’m viewing a dream. The third time I went to the hospital was not even three weeks after the second, I was just starting to make up my school work. The medication they had put me on wasn’t working and my Crohn's was out of control. This time I stayed in the hospital for ten days. I hated it. I hated feeling like a test subject, how my arm had turned into a patchwork of bruises from the I.V and blood work. I hated the constant beeping of the monitors attached to my body. Most of all I hated how familiar the hospital whitewashed walls had become to me. It scared me. During my stay, I was in immense pain that I’ve never really had time to process. I was focused on getting through the day not the emotional implication of my disease. It's been over a year since my last hospital stay (yay!) and I’m still processing everything. I’m getting better every day, we found the right concoction of medication to keep my Crohn's under control and I attend regular therapy. I’m really happy, I’m better now, both physically and mentally. I hope my story can give others hope and show that there’s allows more to a person than meets the eye. Looking at me you would have no idea that has a rare chronic disease. I do my best to remain positive and I hope I will continue to live the best life I can.