Thanks again, everyone. Y'all are every bit as awesome as Cara promised you'd be. I wish I had more specific symptoms to write, because I'm sure it might help. But everything about this illness has been so erratic and confusing. My GE complications can run the gamut from mild tenderness to extesive pain and swelling. Sometimes I have diahrrea for a month, and then it just stops for two months, all with no obvious reason. I've kept diaries, tried diets, starved myself. It's just a very strange disease, and it keeps on progressing. If it ever gets into the right side of my body I'm afraid that the pain will push me over the edge.

I have one last question, though, if it rings any bells in anyone. Have any of you heard of a muscle-wasting illness that began in the abdomen and then spread outward from there?