A person I admire once said, “Once you stop fighting your illness, you will allow acceptance to emerge.” I guess I had never looked at illness that way before. Society tells us to fight illness to our last breath, but is it really a fighting attitude we should...
Last spring, just when I had thought I had turned a corner and had many of my conditions better controlled, I developed a ton of crippling pelvic pain. Within a couple of days, I started bleeding a lot, which made no sense because I had been on hormones for years...
“You have Crohn’s Disease.” That’s what my gastroenterologist told me after my first colonoscopy in 2003. I was 16 years old, and nobody in my family, except for my mom who is a doctor, had heard of the disease.For the last 18 years, I have experienced multiple...
This blog post has been done in collaboration with Girls With Guts Community Connection. By Anisha Gangotra My name is Anisha, I’m 37 years old and I live in Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom. I’ve lived with ulcerative colitis since 2008, from the age of 24. I...
My name is Amy Btiebet Washington, I’m 34 years old and live in Ohio. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was 26 (in 2012). Initially, I thought I had a terrible flu, but after a few days of symptoms, I was rushed to the hospital with a 106-degree fever....
By Tina Aswani-Omprakash, MPH Looking back 20 years ago... When I first graduated college and started working, I had no idea what my life was going to look like. I was full of excitement but I did have a fear in the back of my mind that I may already have inflammatory...
For Tina, a Sjögren's disease diagnosis brought long-awaited answers and sparked her journey into patient advocacy By Tina Aswani-Omprakash **Originally published by Novartis on https://www.novartis.com/us-en/stories/living-with-sjogrens-disease-one-womans-story. For...
By Tina Aswani-Omprakash As IBD warriors, it’s always nerve-wracking to travel with our conditions and/or an ostomy. For me, it’s been 7 years of me traveling all over the U.S. and Europe for patient advocacy work. And even though I’ve spoken many times virtually for...
By Tina Aswani-Omprakash & Natalie Hayden **This article has also been published on Natalie's blog: Lights, Camera, Crohn's ** As two bloggers and patient thought leaders in the IBD community, we were thrilled and honored to attend and speak at the Advances...
Did you know that approximately 25% of people living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) report significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTS)? This PTS is directly related to disease experiences and related hospitalizations and is referred to as...
By Tina Aswani-Omprakash As IBD warriors, it’s always nerve-wracking to travel with our conditions and/or an ostomy. For me, it’s been 7 years of me traveling all over the U.S. and Europe for patient advocacy work. And even though I’ve spoken many times virtually for...
Did you know that approximately 25% of people living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) report significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTS)? This PTS is directly related to disease experiences and related hospitalizations and is referred to as...
SAIA is honoured to announce that Tina Aswani-Omprakash, MPH, is now our full-time Chief Executive Officer 🎉🎉 Written by Madhura Balasubramaniam, Sharan Khela, Dr. Neilanjan Nandi & SAIA’s Board of Directors Tina is a patient advocate and thought leader par...
Are you getting ready to start an advanced therapy (for example, a biologic or small molecule medication) for the first time for your Crohn’s disease? Or perhaps this is round 2, 3, or 4 when it comes to trying advanced therapies to better manage your Crohn’s? Whether...
A person I admire once said, “Once you stop fighting your illness, you will allow acceptance to emerge.” I guess I had never looked at illness that way before. Society tells us to fight illness to our last breath, but is it really a fighting attitude we should...