Alexandra's CCFA Take Steps fund

My name is Alex , I am 17, and I have refractory Crohn's Disease. I have been fighting this disease for 4 years, and I haven't had a break. Just in the past 15 months, i have been hospitalized 10 times for severe symptom flares and other Crohn's complications. I have tried every Crohn's medication available (including new ones), many different diets and other remedies, but to no avail. For most of last year, I was not able to tolerate any food (even fruits and salads) or any drinks, not even water. Because of this, I hadn't eaten in 5 months and had to either be tube fed or intravenously fed. I am still healing and recovering from a Crohn's complication that sent me to the ICU in March, and to aid the process I am once again being tube fed.

Even though I have been through some awful things, I continue to try my best to push through whatever symptoms or complications come my way. I do my best to educate, support, and give hope to others through an IBD blog that I run. We all have different variations of the disease, but in the end we have to unite together to spread awareness and change the way IBD is treated and to make sure IBD gets taken seriously!!

Crohn's Disease is an aggressive auto-immune disease that affects the entire digestive tract from mouth to rectum, and it causes severe abdominal pain, ulcers, canker sores, nausea, vomiting, severe bleeding, inability to eat or drink anything, and other GI problems as well as non-GI problems such as arthritis. 

There are 5.4 million people worldwide that have Crohn's or its sister illness, Ulcerative Colitis. I am raising this money so I can donate it to the CCFA (Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America) at the Take Steps walk on May 2, 2015. So many people are afflicted by these diseases, yet there's not much accurate awareness for them; not to mention there's a stigma that they're just "bathroom diseases" even though they are very serious and dangerous illnesses. We need a REAL cure, because the medications available to us don't help cases like mine, and surgery is not always the answer.

Any donations would be very much appreciated, even if its just $1 it makes all the difference! Thank you for reading this :)

Join our team, "Unicrohn's - Unite to Cure Crohn's", on May 2nd in downtown San Jose for the annual CCFA take steps walk! 

http://www.cctakesteps.org/siliconvalley