One major situation I have always had a hard time with is the whole idea of taking a certain amount of time to "Recover".
Of course, that word is much better understood when it comes to visible physical injury or trauma. It is also very much accepted in terms of grief and loss. It is an expectation that someone with a broken arm needs significant recovery time before using that arm. Time to grieve is also widely accepted and no one questions that that recovery time is different for each person.
This is an amazing thing - that instant understanding that a person requires time to heal, and that no one can dictate how much time is needed for each individual case.
But what about for something like Crohn's Disease?
Unfortunately, the problem is that each person's experience with the disease is completely different, AND there are infinite factors that can contribute to the need for recovery time.
For instance, eating broccoli may result in an 'injury' for someone with IBD. Perhaps it triggered so much inflammation that it put someone into a full flare-up. Well, flare-ups require recovery time or they will not settle down. The toughest part about this example is that, for example, a month prior, that person could have eaten broccoli and not experienced a flare...
And with IBD, as well as many other auto-immune/chronic conditions, there are several ways to cause 'injury'. Sitting upright for too long, standing for too long, eating or drinking something your body winds up reacting to, becoming too emotional, dealing with a stressful situation, participating in too much physical activity, getting a cold or a flu... Basically anything can be a trigger for people, and those triggers are rarely consistent.
So how do we explain to others that something we did yesterday injured us and we need to have the same kind of recovery time as a broken arm or sprained ankle? How do we get society to accept that taking a day off and allowing our intestines to recover is NOT being lazy or unproductive, but exactly what needs to happen? We have to go on clear-fluid or full-fluid diets to give our guts a break, just like someone with a sprained ankle has to stay off of that ankle for a certain period of time.
And I know what you might be thinking - 'but they bring it on themselves when they eat something or do something they aren't supposed to!!'.
Sure, okay, if I KNEW unequivocally that bread, for example, made me violently ill, but ate bread anyways, then yes, maybe I should have known better. Maybe I should just grin and bear it knowing it was my own fault (like with hangovers). But these illnesses are mostly inconsistent.
If you sprained your ankle on a flight of stairs, would people tell you that you should have known better than to climb or descend a flight of stairs? That there is a chance you could trip and injure yourself, so you should always avoid stairs? That it is your own fault so you should simply walk on that ankle and bear the pain because you are injured from your own irresponsible behaviour?
No. I would guess not.
Most people would immediately understand that it was an unforeseen accident - that still requires recovery time.
People who suffer from illnesses that include flare-ups and periods of stability and even periods of remission have very little control over what their body decides to do. So if they need recovery time, it is not 'sitting at home and doing nothing'. It is not 'being lazy'. It is the process of actively recovering from an accidental, and sometimes unpredictable, injury.