I grew up with my parents and my older sister in a small suburb. We lived within walking distance of a school so it is no surprise that there were a lot of children in our neighbourhood. On the straight stretch of the street I grew up on there are maybe 50 houses. As far as I can remember there were about 25 kids about my age (5 years older or younger) who lived there for a long while. I was aware of but wasn’t friends with everyone, spending most of my time with the girl across from us, but my parents were friends with a few other families on the street.

I’m 34 now and haven’t kept track of most of the people I went to school with, and even less so with the people who I shared a straight stretch of neighbourhood with. But of the people I know of: one family has a son a couple years older than me who died of cancer – I don’t know what type. They have a daughter who is maybe 5 years older than me who has either diabetes or an immune condition. The family who lived right next door to us has a daughter my age who died of cancer about a decade ago – Hodgekins I think, and a son a couple years older than me who was just diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. Ulcerative Colitis is the auto immune disease that I was diagnosed with in 2007.

That seems like a lot of kids on the same street with serious diseases.

I’m going to put a list together of everyone else who grew up there, send a few emails, make a few calls, and see how far this thing goes. I have to admit, this freaks me out a bit.

When someone tells me that they’re doing a ‘cleanse’ I usually have to try not to roll my eyes. As soon as cleanses are introduced into a discussion, toxins are not far behind. It’s embarrassing. I have to tune out of the conversation in order to maintain respect for the person I’m talking to. Would you like to buy some Kinoki foot pads? No, that’s foolish – everybody knows that the only way to get rid of toxins is through the digestive tract. Alternatively, wearing the t-shirts offered in my GurgleSlurp shop are a surefire way to extract toxins from your chest and back, protecting the heart and vital organs. In fact, if you’re not wearing a GurgleSlurp shirt, toxins are already causing irreparable harm!

So anyway, I’m doing this cleanse.

Yeah, I know.

Every once in a while my post Ulcerative Colitis tummy starts to hurt. Nothing to call the Gastroenterologist over – a colonoscopy would reveal a perfect colon. It just hurts. The cure is just to stop eating for a couple of days, but that pretty much sucks too. I hate being hungry. I’d rather have a tummy ache than hunger pangs. So instead, I figured I would try a ‘cleanse’ of some sort.

I have the whole UC thing to work around so all of the pro poop cleanses were out of the question. I didn’t want anything that lasted more than a few days – so none of those 3 week no meat no cheese no gluten no anything you might actually want to eat plans. I didn’t just want to drink fruit juices – I can eat sugar for days on end, but I don’t really like to drink it – but I also wanted to avoid a lot of chewing. Also, I don’t really want to lose any weight, so it would have to have enough calories in it. So I tried one of the shakes and vegetable juice plans.

Today was day one. And I think I might be done with it. The shakes are disgusting! The vegetable juice is okay, but … the shakes are disgusting! Who could drink this more than once? Maybe if I believed in toxins I could scare myself into drinking it, but I don’t, so I can’t. Maybe it’ll be better in my porridge, that’s a chew free meal.

Maybe I should just stop having chocolate for breakfast.

The best thing about my Ulcerative Colitis is unquestionably the post therapy bingefest. I take a drug called Remicade (Infliximib) by way of IV infusion, every couple months. It’s a TNF Alpha inhibitor, which prevents my colon from responding to my immune system, thus keeping me from having inflammation, and you know, dying. To help prevent my system from forming antibodies against the drug, I get a big shot of Cortisone (a steroid) beforehand. I usually get that at about 10 am, and by noon I’m pretty famished.

When you’re prescribed a steroid you can expect to gain some weight, this isn’t because the drug makes you gain weight – it’ll shift some fat stores, which sometimes equally sucks, but it won’t cause direct weight gain. What it will do, is completely prevent your brain from receiving the signal that your stomach is full.

And it’s awesome. Every bite is a quest to sate the insatiable. Every morsel is enjoyed like a jealousy guarded delicacy. And my body feels great. My brain can’t tell me that I’m stuffed, so it’s impossible to feel icky. I stop because my tongue begins to ache and my teeth have tired of chewing.

My Cortisone shot only has this effect for a few days, but I only indulge in the binge on day one; if I do this for even two days in a row I will cease to comfortably fit into my pants.