Month: May 2023

Products That Make Life Easier with Crohn’s Disease and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)

Crohn’s Disease and IBD can make life very difficult. Gut pain, bloating, anal discharge, urgency, and fecal incontinence are all difficult subjects to discuss. Here is a list of items that have made my life with Crohn’s Disease a bit easier.

Here are some items I personally recommended that can help make your life with Crohn’s or IBD so much easier. I have personally purchased and/or used every item I recommend. These are items that help me get through my day with Crohn’s.

By means of full disclosure, I may earn a small commission from Amazon for links to any products or services from this website.

If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it is only a matter of time. When you have Crohn’s Disease or IBD, life can be downright “poopy!”

This book can help you see the humorous side of something we really can’t control anyway. You can laugh or hide in embarrassment. Let’s laugh!

When you have IBD it can be really hard to absorb certain vitamins. IBDassist has the vitamins we need in the dosage we need to help keep us healthy. It is so much easier to take one vitamin than dozens of individual ones.

IBDassist IBS Relief works wonders for the symptoms of IBS, and is made to work in conjunction with IBDassist.

With Crohn’s or IBD, a bidet is an essential piece of equipment. Easy to add to your toilet, and easy to use, a bidet cleans your bottom with a stream of water and helps reduce toilet paper irritation.

If you’ve never used a bidet, you don’t know what you are missing. This is a basic model that uses room temperature water, but they also come in deluxe models that use heated water, and ones that have two streams — one for your bottom and one for women during their menstrual cycle.

Once you have a bidet, you’ll never understand how you did without one.

Are you tired of wearing incontinence briefs that are really designed for bladder incontinence and don’t fully work with fecal incontinence? Do you want to wear regular underwear again but still feel safe from accidents? These pads are expensive, but they are specifically designed to catch and contain fecal incontinence including diarrhea!

Do you love to swim but fear having a fecal accident while in the pool? These adult swim reusable pants can be worn under your swim suit, or in many cases, instead of swim suit bottoms. They fit snuggly around the waist and legs to prevent leaking. While they aren’t the most attractive thing in the world, they can give you the chance to return to swimming without fear of an accident.

A sitz bath is so helpful in reducing the pain from hemorrhoids and anal itchiness and sensitivity. This one can collapse for smaller storage. While the description doesn’t say it fits an American oval toilet seat, it does. The squeeze bulb can be used to push water to just the right place. A soak in a warm sitz bath can provide so much relief.

These suction cup hooks are perfect for hanging your sitz bath from your glass shower doors, tile shower wall, or even a fiberglass shower wall. You can simply rinse the sitz bath in the shower stream, and then hang it in the shower to dry. No fuss, no mush — easy peasy!

Add a small amount of these Sitz Bath Salts for Hemorrhoids to warm water in your sitz bath, and soak for about 10 minutes. You can’t imagine how much pain it will relieve. This is the best brand I’ve found so far.

When chronic diarrhea strikes, can dehydration be far behind? DripDrop has fabulous flavors that you mix with water to increase your hydration. This electrolyte powder comes in a variety of great flavors, and can keep you hydrated.

Rollin’With My Crohnies! I just happen to love this t-shirt. It is available in Men’s, Women’s, and youth sizes. They also have many color choices. Sometimes, you just have to have a sense of humor about things. You could laugh or you could cry — I’d rather laugh!

This Crohn’s Disease t-shirt also gives me a chuckle. It is available in many sizes and colors.

If you end up with a hernia because of Crohn’s or IBD, or if you’ve had one surgically repaired but still want to have extra support, I think you’ll like this hernia belt. It gives great support and allows you to be more active without making things worse.

Why a stethoscope? You can use it to listen to your bowel sounds in your gut. You can tell if they are faint and slow, or loud and gurgling. The most important reason to have one? If you hear nothing — if your bowels aren’t moving, which means you can’t hear them moving, it is a pretty good sign that things are blocked and that you may even have a possible partial or full obstruction. If nothing else, this stethoscope (which is long enough to reach my belly) gives me so much peace of mind.

Exam gloves are essential when using anal/rectal suppositories or for applying ointments. They are especially essential if you are dealing with any cream that is made of zinc oxide (such as Calmoseptine or Destin) because otherwise, it is really difficult to wash the cream off of your fingers (it resists water and moisture.) Gloves just make it so much easier.

Calmoseptine Ointment temporarily relieves discomfort and itching around the anus. It provides a multiple purpose moisture barrier. This is my “go to” product for anal itchy, burning, and pain.

If you have bile acid malabsorption, and have to take a bile acid sequestrant such as Cholestrymine, Colesavelam, or Colestopol, then you know how hard it is to mix the bile acid powder with juice or other liquids. It clumps. It floats. It is thick and grainy, and hard to drink. But if you have a Helimix Vortex, you simply mix the powder and the drink, shake it up and down 20 times, and it will be thoroughly mixed. I’ve never found anything that works this well. I highly recommend this.

This leak-proof chair cover can give you so much peace of mind when you are having issues with urgency and fecal incontinence. No one wants to risk ruining their favorite chair. This chair cover prevents accidents from ruining your furniture, and the cover can be washed if needed.

When you have Crohn’s or IBD, unexpected visits to the hospital happen. One thing I’ve noticed is there is never a plug close by and the second thing I’ve noticed is that even when I remember my phone charger cord, I always forget the plug portion of it. This power strip has room for plugs and charger cords. It is also great if you are at the infusion center and you need to charge your phone or kindle.

These are essential when nausea is an issue. I always carry one in my purse no matter how I’m feeling. They are essential if you are riding in someone else’s car — do you really want to barf in your friend’s car? Do you know that if you vomit in an Uber, they charge a $95 cleaning fee to your charge card? If you vomit into one of these bags, you avoid the mess entirely. You also can see the amount of vomit, and it is easy to dispose of.

Ensure Max Protein drinks are great when you are having trouble eating, and need calories and protein. They come in several flavors, have only 1 gram of sugar, and 30 grams of protein. I always keep a few in the fridge for those days I just don’t feel like eating, so I don’t get shaky.

I have to admit, I’m still reading this book, but so far, I’m finding it very interesting and informative. This is the paperback version, but you can also get it for your Kindle at less than half the price.

Great for learning the basics. Please note that they just came out with an updated version which is also available on Amazon. (I didn’t link to it because I haven’t read the newer version.)

I like to share with you my book, Embracing Life’s Limitations: Letting Go of Who You Were Supposed to Be. Part of my journey in this book discusses how I came to lose one-third of my small bowel, develop Crohn’s disease, as well as Bile Acid Malabsorption.

I will never use toilet paper again! Huggies Simply Clean unscented are so much better, and prevent the dryness, itchiness, and soreness caused by even the best brands of toilet paper. You can’t flush these, so you will need a bathroom trash can with a lid. These wipes are lifesavers and life changers. These aren’t just for babies!

When you have Crohn’s, Colitis, IBD, or any type of GI distress, having a bathroom trash can with a lid is essential. This one comes in a variety of colors, has a foot pedal, and a quiet close lid.

What NED Really Means

After you finish cancer treatment, you have imaging often at the six month and one year mark, and then several more times during the first five years to make sure the cancer hasn’t reappeared.

They don’t say you are “cured” from cancer. They rarely say you are in remission. What is normally observed is that you are NED.

NED stands for “no evidence of disease.” It means they no longer see any signs of your cancer. Those of us who have gone through this always know, in the back of our minds, that even if one tiny, microscopic spec of cancer still remains, it can and probably will, be back. This is called a reoccurrence if it returns to the same or neighboring area, or if it travels using your lymphatic system, it tends to metastasize elsewhere in your body, such as your lymph nodes, or your lungs.

No matter how hopeful and how positive you are, if you’ve been in a cancer support group for any length of time, you will know someone who was NED, who seemed to beat cancer, who suddenly finds it roaring its ugly head, and within days or weeks, it overwhelms their body, and they slip away.

A single, solitary thought goes through cancer survivors’ heads — “if I’m still alive . . . ” We all know, even if we never express it, how tentative life is, and how quickly the disease we “survived” can snatch us away.

It took me 6 months after my first NED to stop thinking “If I’m still alive . . .” when I thought about the future — as in, “I’d like to go to the craft festival, if I’m still alive then.” Cancer changes you in ways others who have not experienced it will never understand.

You get treatment, you sort of recover from the treatment, you get NED, and everything seems fine — until it’s not. I lost both of my parents to cancer, and in both cases, things seemed fine, until it metastasized and dealt its final blow.

No matter how much you know it can return, when your life returns to normal and all is well, it is still a shock when it returns. You think you have beaten a great enemy, that you have won fierce battle, and slain the enemy, only to have it reappear and let you know exactly how puny we humans really are — that a microscopic cell could snatch our victory — how fragile the human condition is.

I have no illusions. Cancer is rarely “gone.” It lies sleeping just outside our view until with a lightning strike it jolts you out of your comfortable rest.

I just try to enjoy each day, live that day as it happens, and not worry too much about the future. I like to stay busy in the present since it’s the only thing we can really be sure of.

There is a poem I read for the first time in college, called Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden. I found the words haunting back then, and after battling and surviving cancer, they ring even more true.

Musée des Beaux Arts

by W.H. Auden

December 1938

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

A few close people will feel our loss, at least for a while. Certainly, Daedalus mourned his son, Icarus as he fell to his death. To Daedalus, the loss of his son, Icarus, was a great tragedy. But the rest of world, as portrayed in Breughel’s famous painting Icarus, pays little notice to the boy sinking below the water to his death.

In a similar way, whether we win or lose our battle with cancer, the world goes on just as it always does. We never know if we are soaring too close to the sun, melting the wax that holds us together, and plunging us into the icy waters of the unknown.