In a world where medical professionals have only a few minutes to go over a whole slew of symptoms, medication interactions, and surgical complications, it is impossible to cover the psychosocial aspects of one’s condition(s). These aspects include methods of coping...
This past weekend marked 3 years since my series of surgeries at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. That trial was my greatest test to date. 3 surgeries back to back to clean out remnants of j-pouch, rectum and anal sphincter that left behind a wound the size of a small...
Does nail-biting anxiety wash over you as you await results after a colonoscopy, MRI, or CT scan? Or restlessness while waiting for your latest round of biologics to start kicking in? Yeah, me too. I sit here today twiddling my thumbs endlessly as I await my...
Whether it feels like a bus just squashed us flat or we have that sudden urge to defecate with no end in sight, we all know that feeling when a flare is imminent. And while it is no fun, it is a part of living and breathing with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). So...
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...