“God gave me a second chance,” says Patti Suler who underwent surgery to remove her ulcerated colon.

Photo and story by John Perry

The pain would not end.

The fever, chills, cold sweats and stabbing abdominal spasms would not end.

It was the middle of the night. After 25 or 30 trips between her bedroom and the bathroom, Patti Suler stopped returning to bed. Instead, she leaned her exhausted head against the wall and dozed between seizures.

“I learned to sleep on the toilet,” said Suler, an operations manager in technological services at the Houston Police Department. “I could snooze 15 minutes at a time.”

But then the violent diarrhea would jar her awake with another set of cramps carried on waves of nausea.

She tried not to moan, but her resolve during that wretched night was as shredded as her swollen, ulcerated colon.

Since June 2004, Suler said she was spending the majority of her life in bathrooms. She’d had bad nights before, but nothing like that January night in 2006.

“My guts felt like they’d been napalmed,” said Suler, a 26-year HPD veteran. “Like a fire was creeping through me.”

The pain would intermittently subside. Unwilling to expect more than a fleeting reprieve, she slept where she sat.

And while she slept, she dreamed the story of her illness as it evolved over the years like a familiar black-and-white movie she hadn’t watched for awhile.

She saw her teenage years troubled by frequent bouts of lower intestinal cramps and diarrhea.

Those were warning signs we shouldn’t have ignored, Suler thought in her dream state.

Her well-intentioned mother masked the symptoms with gallons of Pepto Bismol and Kaopectate.

Getting the correct medical information would have saved me a lot of suffering, she thought.

The dream continued, showing lifestyle adjustments she made to accommodate her condition.

I must have learned the whereabouts of just about every bathroom in Houston, she thought.

She saw herself searching for bathrooms throughout the course of her daily routines. When she went to a store or restaurant, if one wasn’t available, she left.

She watched herself at dinner with friends, ordering cautiously to keep from spending the evening in the restroom.

There were decades of dealing with the nameless chronic gastrointestinal disease that shaped the course of her daily life.

At work, she went to the ladies’ room hourly. On “flare-up days,” she delegated office business from the bathroom.

Luckily, most of my staff is female, she thought.

She saw the faces of her puzzled staff, most not realizing what was wrong. They couldn’t understand why she was losing weight. She was eating 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day, even as her weight dropped from 167 lbs to 136 lbs on her 5-foot, 4-inch frame.

She began wearing absorbent undergarments on days she attended meetings. Soon, she wore them daily.

There wasn’t much chance for romance.

Diapers and desirability don’t go together, she thought.

Continuing her dream, she replayed clinic visits resulting in diagnoses such as nervous stomach, ulcers, chronic stress, or a bad case of “stomach flu.”

She watched doctors prescribe medications to ease the inflammation and pain. Prednisone was often prescribed. But like earlier meds, the cortisone derivative merely masked symptoms.

If you aren’t careful, you can take steroids right into oblivion, Suler thought.

Twenty to 30 years of steroid treatment suppresses the immune system to such a degree that it weakens the body, allowing it to succumb to a myriad of otherwise curable diseases. (Source: Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.)

Suddenly, Suler awoke. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was, but then her fatigued body was wracked by another lower-intestinal explosion.

Even with Suler’s unusually high pain threshold, this was unbearable.
The disease had progressed too far. If she didn’t want to die, it was time for the next step – surgery to remove her colon.

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