At Death’s Door
While doctors may not know the exact cause of Crohn’s disease, they do think in Coltyn’s case, a near-death experience at Boy Scout Camp triggered his Crohn’s, which lay dormant up to that point. After almost drowning in the camp’s lake, doctors think bacteria in the water kick-started the disease.
Coltyn underwent the standard array of tests (stool and blood tests, biopsies, various scopes, x-rays, CT scans etc.), and a slew of medications, none of which helped.
“I just got sicker and sicker, I wasn’t getting any better.” He adds that he was put on drug after drug and none of them worked. “I was tired. I was always in pain…always in the bathroom. And with my Crohn’s disease came rheumatoid arthritis.” (6)
Speaking as a patient advocate at the 2015 National Cannabis Summit, Coltyn says that eventually he was put on Remicaide, “a chimeric monoclonal antibody biologic drug.” (7) “It gave me medically induced Lupus.” He says that just one dose of another drug gave him a nose bleed for 15 minutes straight. He was also put on prednisone, which he says caused the bones in his heel to deteriorate to the point he had to wear a special boot for several months (8).
At this point, doctors decided to put Coltyn on Humira, which he says may have helped him grow a little, but that was the only positive effect.
Cancer Scare
In 2013, Coltyn went to a summer camp for kids with Crohn’s disease. Because people with Crohn’s typically have lowered immune systems, they easily catch viruses and bugs. So, after coming home from camp, Coltyn’s lymph nodes swelled “to the size of golf balls.” Doctors ultimately thought it was lymphoma. “It [Humira] actually gave me a T-Cell lymphoma scare,” Coltyn says, referring to the common side effect of this drug (9).
He was immediately taken off Humira and told he needed surgery to remove the lymph nodes in his neck. When Coltyn woke up after surgery, doctors told him they accidently removed his salivary glands as well.
Three Options
Wasting away, and now in a wheelchair, doctors told Coltyn he essentially had three options. They said they could put him on another biologic drug similar to Humira. ”If I took another pharmaceutical, it would have increased my chances of developing T-Cell lymphoma by 66 percent,” Coltyn says.
The second option was a colectomy, which would require him to wear a bag on his side to collect feces for the rest of his life. His last option, according to doctors, was alternative medicine. And that is exactly what Coltyn chose.