My heart jumped, then thudded, as I faced my fears and the door to Room 207 at Los Altos High School. In three minutes, I would walk in, proceed to the head of the class, listen to teacher Cathy Dao recite my bio to roughly 30 10th graders — and then I would say “diarrhoea” out loud for the first time in my life to an in-person public audience.

It was 2024, and I was at the school to discuss a piece of mine that HuffPost published nearly three years earlier, “Here’s What I Want You to Know About Having Diarrhoea While Out in Public .” The essay addresses bathroom urgency, a condition millions of people experience, some for a limited time and others to varying degrees for the rest of their lives. Because I have Crohn’s disease , I’ve been dealing with it on and off for decades.

Bathro

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