Introduction

For a busy academic, Nina Morrison's description of collagenous colitis as a disease that imprisons – because of the urgent need to be close to a toilet – presents insurmountable difficulties. Unlike the immaculate female model on the front cover of her ebook, you simply do not have the luxury to be posing in your silk pyjamas while nursing that second cup of tea. Come rain or shine, your task on a Monday morning is to travel on a packed Tube, in order to reach your institution in plenty of time to deliver your regular nine o’clock lecture. Even more importantly, the chances are that while you may well be female you are not going to look very much like that young model anyway. This is a chronic condition which largely affects older women and as such lies at the very intersection of age and gender. What follows is my personal story: an experience of living with the challenges presented by a little known disabling disease while a full-time female academic, albeit one who at the time was rapidly approaching retirement. It is an account which aims to reflect on what having collagenous colitis might mean in relation to an academy already noted for its gendered ageism.

Defining the disease

Only identified four decades ago (Lindström, 1976), collagenous colitis has been afforded far less medical research investment than its important big sisters Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. At the same time, the PubMed search engine provides 11,335 citations for collagenous or microscopic colitis, 19 of which appeared in the first eight months of 2019 (www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pubmed/).

Collagenous colitis constitutes one of the two subtypes of microscopic colitis, the other being lymphocytic colitis. An inflammatory disease affecting the large bowel, its characteristic is watery non-bloody diarrhoea, with urgent incontinence – often nocturnal – and abdominal pain (Hjortswang et al, 2011). Fatigue and weight loss are likely to result.

What we do know is that there are currently 10 cases per 100,000 persons (Hemert et al, 2018: 39). This agrees with incidents of 5.2 to 10.8 per 100,000 inhabitants per year in Northern Europe and North America (Fernández-Bañares et al, 2016: 805), and the 5–10 per 100,000 cited by O’Toole (2016: 32).