Episode 23: Jeff Gish (Stephanie's husband) shares a spouse's perspective of IBD

In this episode, my husband, Jeff Gish, shares his perspective of Crohn’s Disease as an IBD spouse. He shares his view of what it’s like to live with someone who has IBD and answers my questions about what are some of the things that maybe I should have told him in the beginning or what I could have done (and maybe still do) to help him understand this disease and the roller coaster that comes along with it.

While Jeff wasn’t with me during my first truly debilitating flare in 2006, he has been with me since 2015 and through a number of smaller flare ups. He’s watched me go off medications, back on medications, back off again, and supported me through all my wild hair-brained ideas and diets. From fermenting raw milk to carnivore, he’s even traveled with me and an ice chest full of food so that I didn’t have to eat anything I didn’t prepare myself while on vacation.

We’ve had many Crohn’s-related adventures that we talk about in this podcast and he gives wonderful insight and advice from being on the spouse-side of things, giving us patients a different understanding of our own disease. It has been truly wonderful to have Jeff by my side, knowing he’ll always be there to back me up. He seeks out places he knows I’ll be able to eat when we go out with friends, doesn’t get angry with me when I have my mood swings because symptoms have come back, and has been an incredible rock and pillar of support that I couldn’t be more grateful to have :)

Other than being my husband, Jeff is a forensic engineer (which is like CSI, but for buildings), he’s the reason for my continual escalation of wine snobbery, and probably the most down-to-earth, happy-go-lucky, and easy-going person I’ve ever met, with a sense of humor that keeps me laughing every day...and you’ll definitely get a glimpse of that in this episode!