Alex and I have been friends since high school. We’ve had the same academic career and our friendship still lasts. When Alexandre told me about the hardship he was going through with Andréanne, I experienced many emotions, the two main ones being compassion and interrogation.

Compassion

I hadn’t seen Alex in a long time. I also knew that this wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, as he didn’t really know what was going on. He told me that Andréanne was very sick, that she had lost weight, and even lost hair. I felt helpless and sad at the same time. It’s tough when people close to us are sick. Whether the disease is deadly or not, we feel powerless and the only thing we can do is being compassionate and listen to them.

I was moved to see that Alex was trying his best to support her through this hardship even though he was as scared as her… maybe more. There’s no age to accept disease, but a lot of boyfriends would have decided not to go through this. I certainly don’t judge people who decided to leave, but I honor people like Alex who decided that you can’t argue with love.

In short, he told me the hardships that Andréanne went through over the last months. I nodded and let him talk when he told me about the stoma. I was listening to him like a real friend should. It was then that I asked myself…

Interrogation

While he was explaining the situation, the little hamster in my head started spinning its wheels. “Crohn? Who’s that? What does he do?” Like any stupid human, I acted like I knew what it was. “Oh, okay! Yeah, it must be tough… I understand”. That night, I spent an hour on Google, trying to understand what the disease is, and what it involves. No one likes to be an ignoramus, especially not in the digital era. We want to know everything immediately, and be experts on many topics (or rather on all topics), as if not knowing about something makes us look uneducated. Anyway, I must admit that I didn’t know what he was talking about, and rather than admitting it, I looked it up afterwards. That way, I would be able to answer honestly and understand the impacts of an ostomy when he would talk about this to me again.

While we’re talking about this, you understand that some inflammatory bowel diseases are directly related to stools, right? Unfortunately, the subject is often considered taboo. Why? Because we’re talking about poop. Stools disgust us, but they are natural, everyone needs to defecate! Stefanny, one of the blog’s collaborators, talked about behavioural stereotypes we learn when we are young. I strongly believe that this stigmatisation contributes to taboos surrounding stoma. We still have long ways to go, but isn’t the first step realizing this so we can fight against the taboos better? In short, let us teach you, open your mind and help us tone down and eliminate taboos.

Signed,

A former ignorant person about inflammatory bowel diseases and still an ignorant person on many other topics.

Marie-Noël

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