An Inspired, Resilient Journey Through a Life with Crohn’s Disease

In today's episode, I interview Brad Harris. Brad is the author of a book called Lemon Belly, a memoir of resilience and Crohn's disease. The book describes the inspired way in which he has tackled decades of serious health challenges due to Crohn's disease, including a year long health crisis that nearly killed him.

In our interview, Brad discusses his book, his life with a chronic illness, and how he has remained positive and determined despite his hardships.  Brad, it's so nice to have you here. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Beth. So you've written this book called Lemon Belly, and it's about your life with Crohn's disease.

I think this is a great book. I hope people read it not only because it's well written, but also I think it's such an interesting and good story to hear about somebody's experience dealing with this sort of disease and how that can be such an ongoing thing in your life where people don't necessarily know you're going through that.

And it's really well written book. It's a page turner. And I hope people read it. So, let's start from the beginning. When you first were diagnosed with Crohn's disease, you were a child, what was that like? What was that like adjusting to it? It's pretty scary when you're 10 years old and you're in the hospital and they don't know what's wrong with you.

I feel like you have these moments in life when you grow up really fast and often people don't reach that point until they're like, I don't know, in their 60s or something and they get it. a bad health diagnosis, or people experience a loss. So I feel like that was really big for me as a 10 year old going into fourth grade.

And that was coming up on 40 years ago. And the treatments for Crohn's were very rudimentary back then, compared to like the treatments that they have now. So it was just a really different landscape in a lot of different ways. How did it first manifest in your life?  I had this, like, strange symptom that I was cold all the time, and I just wrote it off, like, we had this family trip to Disney World for April vacation.

My brother is a year younger than me, and one of the days we went to the big water park there, and I remember being so cold in the water, and we're in Orlando. And I just remember shivering and looking around at all these other people that weren't cold. And I'm like, this is strange that I'm so cold and I can't get in the water and everybody else is having a great time.

And that kind of kept on for a few months. And then in July, I just started having these viral symptoms, GI symptoms. And at the time my pediatrician had just retired. And so a young pediatrician had taken over his practice. So that was interesting. So here's a guy that's just out of medical school, probably that did residencies at Children's and he took one look at me and he was like, Oh, he's too thin.

Now I'd always been thin, like super real thin all the time. And my mother's, Oh, you just don't know, Brad, he's always this thin, but we have this virus thing or whatever. And he was like, okay, I want to send him to a specialist off the bat. And then I went into see a GI specialist in Children's. And then that's what he admitted me for three or four days and did some tests.

And I came out with the diagnosis. That is usually not the story for people, especially I would imagine back then, there's so many stories you hear online of people who go years with symptoms and end up getting tests, but they don't have the test prove the diagnosis. That's far more common than what I went through.

So then I'm 10 years old. I'm going into 4th grade. They put me on prednisone, which, like, I don't know what that is. My mother's calling. Talking to people and her friends, they're like, whoa, they're putting them on prednisone. It's a serious steroid. And I was like 60 pounds and they put me on 40 milligrams of prednisone.

And one of the side effects is your body retains more water, especially like in your cheeks and your face. So you get like this round moon face. So that was really hard to deal with. We're talking, it's like 1986. So it's just people, kids making fun of me and all this other stuff. And I need to go to the bathroom and boys in bathrooms at that age are just always fooling around and everything.

I have the serious thing. And on top of that, I need to eat as much as I can. And there wasn't even that much around the nutrition back then. It was just like, get this boy calories. So in that sense, it was like, I had every hostess. thing that they had in the house, like just my mother making rice crispy squares all the time, trying to put weight on me.

And then from fourth grade to seventh grade, it was basically like, okay, he's on a ton of prednisone and let's try to wean him off. But prednisone is a drug where your body gets addicted to being on it. You're weaning the patient off of, off of it. And I would get down until five milligrams, two and a half, zero.

And then my symptoms would come back. And then they put me on more prednisone because literally that was the only thing that really was the most effective treatment back then. And then by 7th grade, they were afraid that my body wasn't going through puberty because you're on a steroid for a long time, that can happen.

So they elected to do surgery, which is basically, so a lot of times I'll describe Crohn's as like plumbing. I probably should have started with this. So you basically have a segment of your intestines, not all of your intestines, but like segment. And in my case, it at this point was the end of the small bowel, like where the small intestines connects to the large intestines.

That's apparently a very common area to have Crohn's manifest. And so they basically take out the bad section. They take a little bit more than the bad section and then take out the bad section. And so the 2 good sections together. And then, it's major abdominal surgery, but then you recover from that, and then you're in remission.

It's an interesting illness in that sense, where it's not all the time. My first surgery was when I was in 7th grade, and then I had a few years of remission, and then sophomore year of high school, it came back. And unfortunately for me, this time it came back in my rectum. The thing with Crohn's is, it can happen anywhere from like the mouth to the anus.

The sister disease or the sibling disease is ulcerative colitis. That's something that only happens in the colon in the large intestine. That's one major difference. So I've always been diagnosed as a Crohn's colitis patient because usually it was around my colon when I was younger. My symptoms in the first round were really like, okay, I have to eat all the time, but I'm doubled over and a painful stomach ache like three or four times a day when food is passing through that area.

So And I think the reason for that is that with prednisone, first of all, it's Crohn's. There's a very specific type of Crohn's ache that I would get. It's very like dead dull kind of ache. But then with the prednisone, the disease would come up and then it would get suppressed and then scar tissue would build.

So that one bad segment ends up just becoming like a ball of scar tissue. When the surgeon removed it, he was like, this is as hard as a lead pipe. He was like, I've never, it's funny, the things that you remember, and I feel like that's something about memoir. In this case, it's like, you really do remember specific things about bad things that happened to you evolutionarily.

And I remember specific lines that people said to me, and I could put those in the book. Like I specifically remember him saying, well, you clearly have a high threshold for pain. If you had this severe of illness and you're living a normal life, as you're saying, I wasn't somebody that was in and out of the hospital.

So that was what life was like in the first part where I'm literally sitting at the dinner table. I will get up from the dinner table eating with my family going into the living room and like crashing on the couch and just being like doubled over for 4 or 5 minutes. And then just like that. I'm good again.

Go back, finish eating and just get back to back with my life. So then the 2nd time around when it appeared in my rectum. Then that meant that everything's happening when I'm alone in the bathroom. So it's like, I'm going to the bathroom a lot. And I'm also in a lot of pain because that's where the stool is passing through that diseased area.

I should also mention that Crohn's is an autoimmune disease. So it's really like the body thinks there's something wrong with that segment of intestine is the same thing as getting hit on the arm and your arm swells up. It's the same thing, but it's just confused and they found a couple years ago that's actually like a combination of bacteria and mucus that cause Crohn's.

Hopefully people are working on that, but that's sort of is the reason behind it. So that was my life as a kid. How did your parents react to that? What was their way of dealing? So it's so interesting  because of the timing, my grandparents were getting older and everything. My mom was dealing with stuff with them and my dad's parents and stuff.

Yeah. And the grandparent generation is like, whatever the doctor says is the right thing to do. Right. That's that older generation mentality. And then my mom was obsessed with getting second opinions on things and low, like the doctors aren't right all the time and you got to get a second opinion, my dad just didn't want to deal with any of this stuff and would get really upset and it really bothered him.

My dad was like, honestly, my dad's one of the most healthy people, especially when I was younger. I mean, everybody starts to deteriorate when they get older, but man, he had probably 75 years of robust health. So I was just the opposite. I don't even remember him staying home from work because he was sick, but I mean, he just was, had a very strong immune system and whatever.

So he, he just like really had a hard time with everything. And that, yeah, so that's sort of his, was my family's thing. My mom was like the student, I'm going to learn about this. I'm going to take notes. I'm going to ask questions to the doctor and everything. And it was really me and my mom for all those years going to doctor's appointments, going to procedures.

It was really me and her through elementary school, high school, and college. And then, so I basically went off to college, and I had a great time at college. But again, I just kept this, kept everything to myself because I could. Everything's happening behind the bathroom door. And that just became my M. O. I want to try to live as healthy a life as possible.

And I don't want people to know that I have this because There's anything around toileting is like a lot of jokes and shame and like all this other stuff that we learned and it's just not super pleasant. So my college friends were just like, Oh yeah, he just goes to the bathroom a lot and it's weird, but it wasn't like, Oh, and this is why.

And a lot of that had to do with at that point, it's the late nineties. I feel like now things are so different. I don't know if it's like anybody who has an allergy or a chronic illness or anything happening to them. It's this younger generation is just so open with everything. And that's partially because everyone's so accepting and just.

Awareness of different illnesses and being help people out and everything, but I have always been like I want to take this myself and I don't want anybody to feel bad for me or pity me or treat me differently. Most importantly, because I have this illness. That's been my main thing the whole time. Yeah, that was really something that I noticed in your book as you're going through your life with this disease that you really kept it to yourself, really just telling no one.

And it's something I'm seeing as a theme in interviews I'm doing for this podcast is how much suffering or just struggle that people go through that other people are not seeing that maybe there's shame around it. Maybe there's embarrassment, whatever. They just are keeping it all to themselves and how many people are walking around with things going on that are hard and nobody knows.

And that's the thing about your book is stuck with me reading through the whole book is that you're going through this silently and it's not small stuff. It's not small stuff. You're getting through it and most of the time until you're older, not telling anybody. So that is, I think what a lot of people.

Experience. What are your thoughts on that? Have you seen that with other people you've talked to? Is that something that you've connected other people on? Yeah, it's interesting being a man because I'll get a lot of, so my ostomy nurse will send me people that are going to have ostomy surgery. That sort of is what was like the next thing that that happened to me is because my rectum was so diseased.

I needed to have a permanent colostomy bag when I was 22. And this is like, The month before I'm going into senior year of college and I was so driven to, okay, I'm going to do this surgery, like kind of at the last minute and then be ready to go back to school. I went back to school and I was still sitting on a pillow, which is weird.

I was like, I got to figure out a story around this. This is super weird. I'm going to class with a pillow because that's a major surgery. It's one of those things that happens every day, but it still is a super major surgery because it's just a lot of vital organs right around there. And so my backside still was healing and everything.

And I was like, Oh, I just saw, I can't remember like what I said, but I said some, it's just, it's easy to just cost things off. And I just become so good at compartmentalizing the illness. Is it super healthy for me to be like that? I don't know. But I get to the point where. When I had that surgery, and then you're supposed to go to see an ostomy nurse about the health of the skin and what's called the stoma, which is like the end of your intestines that's sticking out, that is kind of like the exit point and everything, and I waited like 5 years to go to see someone, and then when I finally did, it was this great nurse, Diane, who's in the book.

But like, that was one of the most cathartic doctor's appointments I've ever been at, because I'm like, okay, here's somebody who I can tell all my war stories to, and because I'm single, and I'm working a job, and I have a bunch of friends and everything, but nobody wants to hear these stories about ostomy accidents and things like that happening to me.

It's like, I just kept everything to myself, and I was able to just bear all with this woman. And she was the one that was like, honestly, most people have a really hard time with this. Most people. We'll stay home and not want to go out and things like that. So when you're aging, you're 20s and everything, and you seem to be the opposite.

I'm like, yeah, I'm trying to live as normal life as I can possibly have, because I want to have all these experiences. I want to date girls. I want to go out to bars with my friends. When you're in your 20s, it's awesome. And I was like, why does anybody need to know? It's all covered up with clothing and everything.

When you were going through that experience at that age and also younger, when you're seeing everybody else being able to be carefree and Have fun. What kind of feelings did that bring up for you? I, I think it took some time, but I really just landed on everybody has a body and they can do whatever they want with their own body.

If people want to smoke and they know that this causes cancer like that, it's not like they don't know that or like whatever else. I just have a different situation than anybody else. And I just need to really stay in my lane. And I don't know, I was able to make my peace with that aspect of things. Life isn't fair.

I learned that super young. It's a great question because I think that's when a big life thing happens that is unfair and you're going through something that nobody else is going through. That's one of the big pills to get over, I think, to just be like everybody else is healthy or any type of loss or trauma or whatever.

Like somebody in a wheelchair would be like, Oh, everybody else is walking around and I can't walk, but I need to make my peace with it because this is the life that I have. I had heard back, like, way back then, who knows where I got this from, but it was one of those little anecdotes that kept me going, is that people that, say, like, get into a car accident and then end up not being able to walk again, they end up totally reinventing themselves, and they end up really finding Happiness with being in a wheelchair.

I don't even know if that's true. That's something I heard probably 25 years ago, but I was like, oh, that kind of makes sense. And another thing that I heard that's similar, that's closer to people that have Crohn's thing with ulcerative colitis is. When it gets really bad, they just get their whole colon removed and then they get a permanent colostomy and then it's not coming back.

But the thing with me is, and I think this is what you're alluding to, is it always comes back. And that's the thing with Crohn's. It just keeps coming back, keeps taking more. That cycle of I'm in remission and then I have a disease state and then I have surgery and then I go back to remission. I kept going through that cycle year after year.

But on the other hand, that Holy smokes to be real, real sick and then be like, okay, we're going to do surgery. And I'm like, I know when I get on the other side of that surgery, I'm going to be back to normal. I feel like other chronic illnesses don't have that. And that has been a silver lining for me to be able to just, okay.

Like when I get to the other side of this, then I'll be good. And the last part of the book encompasses one year of my life, where I was just had this major health crisis. I was in the hospital for three months. It was unlike anything I'd ever been through, and that was something where I probably should not have survived.

But a great doctor, a great surgeon, great care at the Brigham, where I would get all my treatment at that point. And that is coming up on 10 years of having remission from that health crisis. And I attribute that a lot to the great drugs that they have now that weren't available when I was a kid. Oh, that's good to hear, because you always hope that is.

Medical developments keep happening and there's better and better options. That's good to hear So as you're as you describe in your book and you do go through those years though that were there was pain there was physical pain at times when you're going through a crisis and just frustration dealing with the contraptions that you're having to deal with because of The things that have been removed from your body, it feels like throughout your book.

And when I talk to you, you just have this kind of innate. You just want to keep going. You want to enjoy your life. It's like a trooper mentality. I'm going to get through this and an optimism, a fight. How would you explain that? Where do you think that comes from?  I've always been a diehard optimist. Even I remember as a kid, I would get so excited about stuff.

I'd get so excited about going to Cape Cod with my family and stuff. And I was always just like a glass half full kind of person. And then along the way, I picked up little things, little tools along the way to sort of like always find the positive. In whatever's going on. Luckily I've been wired like that.

And actually one of the things, so after I went through everything, so this story happened after the end of the book, I was on a drug, I started on a drug that is for short bowel syndrome, which is what I end up with at the end, I only have. 4 feet of intestines left, and most people have 25 feet of intestines, so that just gives you a sense for how much loss that I've had.

So, they, the company that does the drug invited me in to just give, oh, we're having an R& D meeting, so we like to have a patient come in and get up and talk, because a lot of these people that work at these drug companies and pharma are far removed from the actual patient. It's not like the doctors. And nurses that are hands on.

So I give like a TED talk of my book and a standing ovation at the end of it. And that was one of the early indicators that I'm like, Oh, my story is resonating with all these strangers who would have thought. And I do a Q and a and this physician that works at the company, he's stands up and he's okay.

So I have this puzzle that I've had throughout my career. He didn't say what specific diseases or type of doctor that he was, but he was like, I spent my career with patients with a similar illness to you. And what I would find Transcribed Time and time again is I would have a patient with a very mild version of the chronic illness and their life would be derailed and their whole life became this illness and it becomes who they are and everything.

And then I would have patients where they would have a severe version of the illness and a lot more symptoms. And these people would find a way to just live a more normal life with the disease. And he's like, clearly you are somebody in that second category. Great. And this is something that I've always wondered about.

He's, can you shed some more light on it? And I'm like, this is the first time that I've done one of these things. And I fumbled through some answer for him. I don't even remember what I said, but I remember driving home from that being like, that doctor said that thing. I'm like, that is a really interesting question.

I've never really heard that perspective before. And I feel like that sort of became the thesis statement or something like that for this book. Just to show, don't tell all of the things because it really isn't something that I could answer in a five minute answer or something like that. It really has to do with being able to write a 376 page memoir about it.

And I'm starting when I'm nine years old and just like going through everything because the only way you really understand what I went through is to be like. This happened first, and then this happened, and then this happened, oh yeah, and then this happened, oh yeah, and then this is what this guy said to me, and then this happened, and I just remember I have all these stories in my head that I'm walking around, and I'm like, oh, remember when that guy said that to me, I remember when this happened, and you're almost telling yourself the story over and over again, and the craziest thing that I would have never expected in writing this book, Cause I'm not, I should say, I'm not a writer.

I am a graphic designer, creative director for my job. I've always been artistic. That's a thread that goes through the book as well. Just like my career types of places I'm working, but I'm not a writer. I read a lot and I really like memoir. And I just have this collection of all these stories that have happened to me.

But when I went through that health crisis in 2014, which is the last part of the I was like, if I ever write a book. That would be the third act, what happened to me there. And then I found a writing coach and I started writing story after story, which just became all these chapters that had to do with two things.

My life with Crohn's, some type of illness thing, which is in almost every chapter, or me leading a successful life despite having Crohn's. Those are the two qualifiers. So there are not many chapters I wrote that ended up on the cutting room floor. It sounds like you had this book already, it was formulating in your mind, and you're walking around with it, and then you got it down on the page.

I got it down on the page, and now that it's out in the world, I don't think about any of those stories anymore. It's the exact same thing as if you're a list person. Oh, I got so much stuff to do this weekend. And you're like, I gotta do this. Oh, I gotta go there. I gotta do this errand. And then you're like, wait, I just need to stop and make a list.

And you write the list. down and then your brain just relaxes and you're like, I don't need to think about that anymore because I got the list. That is the best analogy I have for how I feel after having written this. And I've really been able to move on and writing the book has been just an incredible experience for me.

At the end of it, I'm like, if I sell zero books, this is still totally worth it. Oh, that's great. Have you had any connection with other people, any response to it that somebody read it and connected with it? Oh, total. In a way, this is like a coming out party for me because so many people knew nothing about what was going on.

From people that I know, that was the biggest response. I had no idea. Friends from years ago being like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I would have helped you. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't want the help. I needed to do all this myself. Thank you. But nobody could know the anguish that was gone going on internally with myself.

And then there's nothing that makes me feel better than when people send me a note saying how this book really helped them. I have parents saying, Oh my God, I have a teenager that has a chronic illness and you've really helped me to get inside their head about what they must be going through because teenagers aren't very vocal about stuff.

I have patients had, I had a patient a couple of months ago, you know, and like, you're basically writing my story. We're of similar ages. I went through very similar things. It was incredible to read about all this. So just like the gamut. And then I don't know, there's like huge weight lifted. The fact I have colleagues, I have friends that now know all this personal stuff that I've gone through and have completely accepted all of it.

And it's of course, I guess like the average person is, Oh, of course they're going to do that. Or somebody like me that sort of was programmed when I was 10. In the years when you're 10 and it's the mid 80s and there's bullying and if I say stuff like this, it's going to be a negative consequence. We live in such a different world now, but it's really been fantastic.

Yeah, good. And I have to bring up your wife because she's a part of that book as well. And you have a very lovely relationship that you document in there. And I think that is such a nice part of your experience. That support that you had, tell me about that. You had your mother, but you were a lot of times you were facing it alone and then you had your wife as support as well.

What was that like? Yeah. And there was a real sort of transition when I started dating my wife, there was a palpable stepping back of my mom when I'm in my mid to late twenties. And the year that I met my wife, I was getting out. So one of the big things that would happen to me is again, back to the scar tissue.

All the scar tissue builds up around the spot and then you're eating and you're eating and you're eating and that spot just almost closes up and it's an intestinal blockage, which is incredibly painful. I obviously have not had kids before, but I do think that it's something similar to what women get in childbirth with contractions because you just have this thing that's like, Pushing up against it and then easing back and pushing up against it.

And it's just really painful. Thousands of people die from them every year. So a month before I met my wife, I'd had an episode. And then after we'd been dating for a few months, we were like in New Jersey, visiting her sister who had just had a baby. And I had a flare up with a intestinal blockage down there.

I was in a strange hospital. I was like, I got to get home. I didn't want to be here. And she was just like, I am totally here with you. And. That was an incredible, it was an incredible experience, and I think it was good that that first year of us dating, we were going through stuff where it's like I had surgery that year, it's like she would come to visit me in the hospital and everything, and she's been nothing but supportive, and it's the kind of thing too, where she really would want to, she really wants to help more than I want her to help.

Usually, I really needed her help when I went through the health crisis at the end of the book. But usually I'm like, I got it. I'm like, I got to just do this myself or whatever. But yeah, she's an incredible, incredible woman. And we have a very strong marriage and just like relationship. And we're just one of these couples that have been through really hard things before we even get married.

So, I don't know, it was a really interesting litmus test for the relationship to be able to go through hardship before you're becoming officially committed to one another, you know? It is a love story thread that goes through the book as well, which is nice. Yeah, it is. And you guys have a couple kids. So what's that been like?

What's fatherhood been like for you after all this? Do you look at things differently? Do you think you have a different outlook raising children or anything? I think when, when we had our first and you're getting into the parenting thing, which is usually the biggest change any human goes through in their life when you have a baby, I think that she and I were used to dealing with stuff and the baby was just part of it.

And I have two boys. It's the kind of thing that I say, okay, this is what I say. Every family, I'm very, obviously very open about all of the weird things. Dad has a very weird body. That's not like everyone else's. I do, for example, when I'm out in the world, you would not know this, but every night I have a port in my chest, which most people know through people get for chemo, for cancer treatments, because it means you don't have to continually get peripheral IVs and always getting poked.

It's like a. Permanent thing. So I get nutrition at night called TPN. I do that three nights a week. And on the off nights I do a liter of fluids because with short bowel syndrome, that's how I really get nourishment because I basically don't have a digestive system or a broken digestive system. And this gets the nutrients like skipping the middleman into my bloodstream, which is great.

I weigh like 165, 170 pounds, which is the high watermark for my life. Like it's really a great thing. But I have a whole setup initially in our bedroom. My wife has a very project manager way of thinking. She set this whole thing up with an Ikea table and I have like saline flushes and all my supplies and all my stuff.

It's the kind of thing where it's like, I'll hook up at eight o'clock at night and then it will run for 10 hours. And then I disconnect at like six in the morning. So I would be like, Oh, I'm going to go hook up to my TPN. And my kids would be like, dad, are you going to hook up to your TPN? And they would hang out, sit on the bed, talk to me while I'm doing this stuff, tubing and getting everything.

Going. So the thing that I say, though, is everybody's family is weird, but you don't know what sort of flavor of weird your family is until you grow up and leave the house and start living with other people. One of my favorite examples of this is my sister in law's mother would, when she was growing up, would would always recycle paper towels and she would.

Hang them up around the kitchen to dry. Oh, I just use water for that. We'll dry it out and then I'll be able to reuse it. So then she goes off to college and her roommates are like, what are you doing with all these paper towels? You just throw them away. And so it's like that kind, everyone has that kind of weird thing.

So that's what it's going to be for my kids. I think where it's, I don't know, they're like totally healthy. Thank God. And my wife's totally healthy and they have regular normal bodies that function the way that it should and I do not. So it's just going to be something that's a little bit different for them.

And it's not anything I'm going to hide from them, but it's just one of those things. It's not a big deal. Yeah, I think that's great. And like you said, Times have changed and I think we're about the same age and I can imagine me going through school at the same time as you and the way things work. Yeah, for sure.

I think my instinct would have been to keep this to myself and things really are different now and it's nice. Not only the medical developments and just being able to be open and have people show compassion for things. Maybe they would have, probably a lot of people would have, but back then it wasn't something that I think somebody would want to share necessarily growing up.

Even though things are different now, I feel like you forget what it's like to be hanging around with a bunch of 18, 19 year olds too. No one has any life experience. Everyone's just trying to like figure it out. And I don't know, I was just able to compartmentalize things. And for my money, I agree with what you're saying.

I think most people take that route versus the people that are like. I have Crohn's disease and this is all the problems that I have. Like, I don't want to tell people my problems in general. I think that's how most people are. If you can, if you, if it's an, if it's a disease that like you can cover up and hide.

So the great irony is like the whole, my whole time with Crohn's and I've been able to hide it. And now I can do a similar thing with the short bowel syndrome, where it's like, I have all this stuff. Like I was talking with a colleague of mine who has kids and he's, what's the, what's the division of labor when you're packing to go on a trip?

And I'm like, honestly, I have so many medical supplies that I pack all of my stuff and my wife packs her stuff and the kids stuff. And then the amount of time is pretty even, you know, even when they're younger, because if I forget something, I can't just go to CVS and pick it up. Yeah. with all the specific stuff that I need.

I have to say, I mean, it is admirable. And I know that you are a trooper, you have this kind of mentality. And that's great. I think it's probably served you really well, you just keep going forward and living life to the best of your ability. And speaking now you do speaking, you wrote this book. I know you said you're not a writer.

But I want to say in this podcast, this is a really good book. And it's one that keeps you Wanting to know what happens next. So although I think we all hear these crones and ulcerative colitis commercials, and I had no idea before I read your book really about any of the details of that. This is a really, it's an educational book, but it's also as humor and lighthearted and a lot of really positive aspects.

And it's just a good book. I really wanted to just be like the bear all type of a thing. Like this is one of the things I would think when I was writing is this is like the non Wikipedia explanation of what it's like to live with, with crones. Um, it's like super detailed and everything because it works really well as an awareness book for people that have, that's another category of people that just like reading memoir.

And it's, Oh my God, now I know when somebody has Crohn's, all the stuff that they might be going through. And that's what I really wanted. And then the other thing that I wanted, so I work, I am a graphic designer, I work at a marketing agency. So my sort of creative, uh, how I sort of work in my job and in my career is, okay, so the client likes this look, I like this look, here's this third look.

I'm going to take these three different things and combine them to make something new and it's a win. But with this, I was like, I need to write this book like only I could write it. It's going to be a hundred percent my voice. I'm going to write it like the way that I talk. I think that has to do with the readability of the book.

And like you said, I'm super flattered that I feel like the number one thing is that people say the book's a page turner and that it's super informative and it's really well written. And I'm a big analogy person. There's probably a billion analogies in that in the book, but I think that's how People learn to understand and relate to things.

That was my strategy going into it. I have one more question for you. When you have dealt with a lot of doctors, hospitals, nurses, With all the different experiences you've had with that, you said your mom was a person who, I want a second opinion, your grandparents were people who were like, just listen to the doctor.

Where are you now, in terms of when you see a doctor, and you have trusted doctors now, I know that, but where would you say you stand now? On that issue. That was another thing that I really wanted to unearth when I was writing this memoir was that when I go into, if I get admitted to the hospital, often an older doctor will come over to me and we'll be talking and I'm recognized as like a veteran patient and somebody who can advocate for myself really well and listen and understand things.

But in the book, you see all these instances of me. Getting the courage to say something to a doctor or deciding to do something. It's not something that you just show up at a hospital and you know everything. It's a system. Anything's a system. It's a system. Like when you go to the DMV or if you were God forbid arrested, that's a system.

Uh, being in jail and the courts and everything, I have no experience with that. But I have a ton of experience in hospitals and health care and what I can say and what I can't say. And for example, no one gets discharged from the hospital on the weekends. If I'm coming up towards the end of the week and I'm like, Oh, I got to really try to get out of here on Friday because I know if I'm not out of here on Friday, I'm here the whole weekend.

And I'm getting discharged on Monday afternoon because all the doctors show up at hospitals are not like 24, seven. They're they're nine to five Monday through Friday. And then there's like a weekend shift. So no one's making any big decisions over the weekend. So that's something being able to just advocate for myself, being able to say timeout, I don't understand why we're doing this test or whatever.

I just am very above board about all that stuff because as a patient in that situation, my best advice to people, two things, number one, you're the only person that. Is responsible for you and you have to advocate for yourself. If you don't understand something or you don't like something, you can always say no.

I've never actually discharged myself from the hospital though. I came really close one time in 2020 when I was in for getting the bloodstream infection on my line. And it was that situation where it was COVID and it was before vaccines and everything. And I was super uncomfortable being in the hospital and this hospital was going super slow.

And I said to the nurse, I go, I said something like, It's I mean, I feel bad. I even think about this now. I feel bad for the nurse, but it's needed to be said. I was like pacing the halls and I was so mad and it was like 8 o'clock on Friday morning and I go if I don't get out of here today, if I don't get out of here by 3 o'clock this afternoon, I'm discharging myself.

So you guys figure out how to get these doctors to pay attention to me. And then sure enough, I was able to get discharged. Sometimes push comes to shove, but you need to just really understand. It's not. My mom was always apprehensive about what the doctors would say, or like, is this the right thing, or should I get a second opinion?

I am more like, I'm going to one of the best hospitals in the world, so I have peace of mind there, that like, whatever these guys are suggesting is the best that I'm gonna get, and so I can listen to them, and I can question them and everything. So there, there's a lot of that in the book, and I feel like you can see me becoming a stronger and stronger patient as I go through different hospitalizations.

The second big thing I'll say is if you're ever in the hospital with abdominal surgery, or you're in the hospital bed, the number one thing that you can do to get better, no matter what, is to get up and walk. And it sucks. It sucks at first, but you want to be known as the person who's getting up and walking.

Because there's something about being able to be vertical and you're walking, it gets your stamina up. Every day that you're lying in a hospital bed and you don't get up and walk, it takes two days of your regular life to sort of regain that stamina. My father passed away in 2020 and I feel like he ended up being a victim of this because he had a fall and he broke his collarbone. 

He cracked a rib and he cracked his pelvis, but that pelvis fracture, he was 86, right? That pelvic fracture, it was, again, it's during COVID, so I couldn't go in there and help him out. People weren't getting him out of bed, and he just went, like, one month, like, in the bed, and then that ended up being his demise because our bodies are not designed to be horizontal.

They're designed to be able to get up and move around and everything. That was my number one other thing. They will say that to you, but I'm telling you, you got to get up and walk. That's the most important. That's going to get you out of the hospital faster than anything. So that's my advice. That's actually, that's, yeah, that's a good piece of information.

And I could see how when people are really feeling awful, it's just the last thing. They're like, no, I can't, I'm not going to get up. But how the rewards obviously greatly outweigh the downsides of that. Yep. And that was something that I learned from my mother, really, in that first hospitalization. They said something like that to her, and my mother was like such a, she was very strict, and we're going to do this, and whatever.

She was the one that was like getting me up, and I'm walking, and it's like me, her, and the IV pole, and we're going down the hallway, and we're going to do more tomorrow. And it's just, yeah, that, That was instilled in me, like, very early and I've never had any doctor or nurse say otherwise. They're like, yep, you're doing the right thing.

Oh, look, this guy's up walking again. A good feeling to run into your doctor in the hallway when you're up walking. You know what I mean? I was like, oh, you're up walking. Like, you're up walking. They're like, we got to get this guy out of here if he's up walking, because we got a lot of other patients that could use this bed, right?

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Do you have anything else that you'd love to get out there that you'd like to share? Lessons learned, thoughts. I don't think so. I think this is like really covered a lot. Thank you so much for having me and for reading my memoir. My memoir is available on, on Amazon. It's easy to find me, Brad Harris.

The book's called Lemon Belly. And I would encourage it for at the, at the outset, I was like, this book isn't for everyone. I still stand by that, but a lot of people have read it and be like, anybody would really enjoy reading this book because it's page turner and you're learning so much about.

Something that's a chronic illness, way more than wearing a colored band on your wrist. You're really learning what it's like. And for the audio book people, I have all the equipment. I'm going to do an audio book version of it. It's something I just have not been able to get around to and do it, but that will be coming at some point.

Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for being here. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.