By Lauren Baerg
Being a teenager can be hard for a lot of people. I was no exception — I found out I had ulcerative colitis when I was 16 years old, in high school in Owen Sound.
I was very scared and anxious when I was first diagnosed about how this would affect the rest of my life. A chronic illness can be a hard thing to accept. It can also be difficult for the people around you to understand what you’re experiencing.
In general, people who have ulcerative colitis have a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that affects the lining of the large intestine. We experience many painful and awkward symptoms, like severe abdominal pain, fatigue, rectal bleeding and diarrhea.
A big part of when you’re first diagnosed is figuring out what is going to work for you, like determining your food sensitivities and trying different medication options. To help with my symptoms, I experimented with my diet for two years and cut out meat and dairy as a result.
Mostly, I consider myself lucky because I found a medication that worked for me pretty early on. I take mesalamine every day, which costs about $200 per month. I had to switch drugs after another drug I was taking for five years stopped working. There are people I know who have spent years searching and have not been able to find a medication that works, at all.
Volunteering with people with Crohn’s disease and colitis has shown me how serious IBD can be. Many people I know have been hospitalized because chronic inflammation of their intestine led to severe damage of their tissues. In these cases, some people will have part of their small or large intestine removed. If they have had a significant portion of their bowel resected, the patient may require an ostomy, which really impacts their day-to-day life.
Years of living with ulcerative colitis have motivated me in my research.
My current work focuses on genetically engineering probiotic bacteria in the lab. The aim is to develop postbiotic therapeutics from these bacteria to treat IBD. The hope is that this postbiotic will help slow disease progression and improve the way IBD patients live.
I’m working on developing new IBD therapeutics because I’ve seen how difficult it can be for patients to be ushered through different treatments. Sometimes, I think people can easily look at IBD from the outside and think there are plenty of drug options for people with IBD, but when you hear all these stories, you know there is a need for something better. Now, I’m working on finding it.
Lauren Baerg is a fifth-year PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Biomedical Engineering and a volunteer with Crohn’s & Colitis Canada.