A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : A Good Cause Emerges from a Child’s Pain

As causes go, Valerie Krasner’s has an image problem.

“How many people really want to talk about diarrhea and how many times they have to go to the bathroom?” asked Krasner, who until October was president of the San Fernando Valley Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. “Obviously it is a closet disease.”

But Crohn’s is a serious chronic disease that attacks the bowels and causes a painful narrowing of the intestines. Sometimes fatal, it also affects skin, eyes, kidneys and can stunt growth in children. It can ruin a social life and affect a job. The cause of the condition is unknown and there is no cure.

Krasner’s daughter, Jodi, had Crohn’s disease as a teenager but it was misdiagnosed for years, Krasner said. Doctors thought Jodi’s condition was due to some sort of blood disorder, which they treated with bone marrow transplants. By the time Crohn’s was correctly diagnosed, the disease had created a hole in the bowel, forcing surgeons to remove 1 1/2 feet of intestine.

“I’ve never felt her pain,” Krasner said, talking about her daughter’s ordeal, “but I’ve been in emergency rooms with her for the past 13 years.”

During a particularly bad episode in 1989, Krasner pledged to do something and joined the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. Jodi Krasner, now 27 and an interior designer, also is a chapter board member.

Family and friends of sufferers have been a key to the growth of the group’s San Fernando Valley chapter, which includes 400 members and 1,500 supporters from Bakersfield and San Luis Obispo to Burbank and Santa Clarita. The chapter started in 1973 with a handful of people meeting in each other’s homes to support sufferers of Crohn’s, as well as those with ulcerative colitis--another inflammatory bowel disease in which the wall of the colon can be punctured.

“You don’t have to suffer alone,” said Bernie Otis, 67, a Woodland Hills sales and marketing consultant and the new chapter president. About 2 million people are known to have Crohn’s and colitis in America, but more may be undiagnosed.

Otis was 32 when he was overcome with excruciating abdominal pain while in an airplane circling Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on a business trip. He has lived with it since, adhering to a careful diet that avoids, among others, everything with seeds and skins. Potatoes, apples and salads can trigger an attack when small particles of food lodge in the narrowing intestines, which become inflamed.

The pain is so excruciating, “I holler just to get the energy out,” said Otis, who one day will need to be fed by intravenous tube.

Otis joined the chapter last year, just as Krasner was running out of steam. She had led a major fund-raising effort in late 1994 and 1995 that brought in $100,000, prompting the national organization to name the local group “Volunteer Chapter of the Year.”

But the pace of the fund-raising was a strain. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” Krasner said.

“This chapter was so successful, it almost self-destructed,” Otis said.

The national foundation uses 80% of the funds for research, while the Valley chapter spends the balance to publish a newsletter and pay office expenses.

The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation can be reached at (818) 999-0448.

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