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On Christmas morning of 2008 I started having diarrhea and did not feel well. Thinking it was just the stomach flu I waited a few days before seeing my doctor. Turns out that Christmas morning was the day my Crohn's Disease woke up. Crohn's Disease is an auto-immune disease for which there is no cure. Essentially my immune system thinks that my GI tract is infected and so it sets about trying to "cure" it. This leads to inflammation which results in ulcers/diarrhea. For two years I tried just about every Crohn's medication that I could. None of them helped. In late February of 2011 I was admitted to the Cleveland Clinic. After a colonoscopy it was determined that my Crohn's was running rampant and that I needed to have my colon removed. I weighed 120 pounds. I had no energy. I had basically spent the prior two years "living" on my couch. Since my ileostomy surgery and then my reversal I have been doing extremely well. I now wish to give back and help raise money for the Cleveland Clinic Digestive Diseases Institute so they can continue to help those who suffer with an IBD. My goal is to swim 24 miles across Lake Erie the last Saturday in July, 2013. I hope I can count on your donation.