American ellipsis
Shappy fans,
I’ve had a bit of a health scare the past two weeks that landed me back in the States, but am happy to report I’m now cleared to get back on the road!
I don’t talk about this a lot, but here goes. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Crohn’s Disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, when I was six years old. At 17, I had a flare so severe that I lost 50 pounds, was in extreme and constant pain, ended up in the hospital, and was one failed treatment away from needing drastic surgery. The high dose of steroids I took in a failed attempt to suppress the inflammation resulted in further complications, including “moonface” and heavy acne (which I had for half of senior year of high school), as well as bone death in my right knee (requiring more surgery and physical therapy). Thankfully, I’ve been on a drug for the past 10 years since that has quelled all symptoms, and I’ve been in remission ever since.
I’m writing all this down so you can understand the state of mind I was in when toward the end of my trip in New Zealand, I started to notice the early onset of symptoms consistent with CD. I had timed my drug dosages carefully such that I should have been ok, so I feared the drug was losing its effectiveness. This resulted in a mad scramble to coordinate care between a local gastroenterologist and my doctor back in the US. While I was still able to enjoy the remainder of my trip, given the symptoms were relatively mild, the fear of regressing back to those dark days at 17 led my doctors and I to conclude I should come home and get treatment instead of pressing on to Nepal.
I’ve been back in the states for the past two weeks. My sister recently moved to LA, and it just so happened my parents and grandma were down there visiting her, so I made my way down as well. It was pretty jarring to go from basically sleeping in a car for a month to cocktails and dinner at Catch*. We ate great food, did one of those ridiculous celebrity homes tours, and generally got to see what my sister’s new life in LA is like. I’m very happy for her; she’s put in a lot of hard work and now it’s all paying off.
My friend, Alex, is a pretty successful artist currently on his first headline tour, so I got the chance to see him perform as well.
Fun times over in LA, my full-time job the first week back in SF was fighting my health insurance company to approve treatment, because America. Over the past few days, I’ve done a lot of catching up with friends and former co-workers and managing my treatment plan. I had to have a bit of an involved procedure done this past Tuesday, but the good news is my doctor has now formally approved continuing travel.
I actually have a few friends in SF also living the funemployed life, so yesterday we took a trip up to Point Reyes for a day of hiking and eating. We also visited an ashram, or Indian spiritual center, to meditate and walk the grounds.
In all, it’s been a pretty stressful past few weeks. But I vowed a long time ago that I would never let Crohn’s get in the way of living the life I wanted to live. I love travel: I believe it broadens and strengthens the mind. Meeting people with wholly different backgrounds from your own deepens your empathy. Seeing new landscapes, architecture, and art heightens your creativity. Abandoning your commute and breaking the 9–5 pattern alters your perception of time and reshuffles your priorities. I have done, and will do, whatever it takes to get my health in order and back out on the road. My flight to Nepal is tomorrow!
*LA already feels like it’s outside of reality as it is and here’s my theory on why. The entertainment industry produces content that generates culture as a by-product. That content is always inspired by, or often blatantly about the lives of its creators in Southern California. These creators aren’t living in a vacuum, and are also content consumers themselves, so sub-components of the cultural by-product, like memes, tropes, and shifting norms, inevitably seep back into reality in LA, only for creators to absorb them and produce more content. This results in a magnifying / deforming effect where LA’s reality starts conforming to culture. If you’ve seen the film Synecdoche, New York, I think of LA as doing to itself on a zeitgeist scale what Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character was doing to himself on a New York City scale. Or maybe it’s just the sun and everyone’s brains are fried.
