Close your eyes for a moment and step into my world.
You’re lying in a hospital bed that doesn’t feel like a bed anymore, it feels like a holding space, a place you’ve been placed and forgotten. The ceiling tiles blur into a pattern you memorize out of boredom and survival. The clock on the wall ticks, but time doesn’t pass. And every time you wake up, you have to remind yourself where you are… and why.
There’s someone else’s blood in your veins…..multiple strangers, actually. People you’ll never meet, whose quiet generosity is now literally keeping your heart beating. You feel different, altered, not entirely yourself, but also not entirely alone.
Now imagine this going on not for a night, not for a week, but for 32 days.
That was my reality.
During that month-long hospital stay, I saw my children only twice. Two visits in 32 days! I can still feel the ache in my chest from watching them walk back out of the room each time, trying to be strong for them while I was falling apart inside.
I was two hours away from home, away from my support system, away from everything that made me feel grounded. And because of C. diff., I spent much of my stay under quarantine — isolated not just emotionally, but physically. Some days, the only people I saw were nurses in masks, gowns, and gloves.
I’ve never been more surrounded and more alone at the same time.
Ulcerative Colitis didn’t just attack my body — it attacked everything.
There was the physical pain, the kind that makes you grip the sides of the bed and forget how to breathe.
There was the emotional pain, the fear that eats away at you when you can’t control what’s happening inside your own body.
And then there was the mental fog. A mix of medications, exhaustion, trauma, and what felt like grief for the life I used to have.
But the illness didn’t stop with me. It reached into every corner of my family’s world.
While I was lying in that hospital room, my children were shuffled between family members, staying wherever someone had space, whenever someone could help. They were young, confused, and scared in their own ways. Each of them carried the weight differently: one cried more, one grew quieter, one acted out from worry he didn’t know how to express. They needed their mother, and I simply couldn’t be there.
That reality broke me more than any symptom ever could.
My marriage, already strained by fear and uncertainty, suffered deeply under the pressure. Illness exposes cracks you didn’t know were there…..or ones you hoped would never widen. The stress, the distance, the emotional exhaustion… it all took a toll that changed everything.
Ulcerative Colitis didn’t just isolate me in that hospital room.
It fractured the life I had outside of it.
I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t in my right mind. Some days I couldn’t even string together enough clear thoughts to answer doctors’ questions or to even advocate for myself.
Other days, all I could think about was whether I’d ever have a future to go back to.
People talk about “visualizing your future” as a form of hope. But in that hospital room, the future wasn’t something I could picture. Not ten years. Not even ten months.
When I tried to imagine life a decade ahead, all I saw was a blank space… or worse, the possibility that I might not be there at all.
It’s hard to admit this, but death crossed my mind more than hope did.
Not because I wanted to necessarily die, but because the idea of surviving felt so far out of reach.
Ulcerative Colitis is a chronic illness, but what people don’t talk about enough is the way it fractures your identity. Your sense of purpose. Your sense of control.
In that 32-day stretch, I wasn’t worried about work, bills, errands, or anything else that usually fills a day. I was worried about making it through the next hour.
There’s a kind of pain that doesn’t show up on lab results or scans, the kind that comes from being scared, confused, isolated, and uncertain all at the same time. That was the pain that nearly broke me.
But this isn’t a story just about suffering.
It’s a story about surviving.
It’s a story about how broken moments can become the starting point of something bigger. How pain can turn into purpose. How being lost can eventually lead you somewhere unexpected….somewhere meaningful.
I didn’t know it at the time, but those 32 days were part of the journey that led me to Empowear. To advocating. To connecting. To building something for people who feel the same loneliness, isolation, and fear I once felt.
Ulcerative Colitis didn’t end my story, it transformed it.
And if you’re reading this from your own hospital bed, or your couch, or your bathroom floor at 3 a.m., I want you to know something:
You’re not alone.
This pain won’t last forever.
And your story does not end where your fear begins.
There is life on the other side of this.
There is hope beyond the fog.
There is strength inside you even when you can’t feel it yet.
You will not be stuck here forever.
And someday, maybe sooner than you think, you’ll look back and realize you survived something that once tried to swallow you whole.
You are living your “beyond,” even now.
