OMAHA — Kathleen Baker stared at the seemingly simple question on the form distributed to members of the United States Olympic swim team. What challenges did she have to overcome on her way to qualifying for the Rio de Janeiro Games?
For Baker, one of about 700,000 Americans who have Crohn’s disease, the answer could fill a 70-page spiral notebook, and it is not as easy as WebMD. How does one begin to explain the physical and psychosocial challenges of living with a disease — a chronic, recalcitrant gastrointestinal inflammation — that can be embarrassing to talk about? How could she describe the medications that can lose their efficacy over time, or a fatigue so fathomless it can sap your will?
Baker, 19, has fought to prevent her health challenges from defining her. Talking for the first time about her condition, she said: “I found doctors who weren’t going to be just like, ‘You’re Kathleen with Crohn’s disease.’ I need to be Kathleen the swimmer with Crohn’s disease.”
Baker, who qualified for the Olympics in the backstroke — and perhaps a relay — seven years after receiving the life-altering diagnosis, will not be the first American Olympian with Crohn’s. The kayaker Carrie Johnson, now retired, made the first of three Olympic teams in 2004, a year after she was found to have the disease. Other prominent athletes who have the condition include the N.F.L. quarterback David Garrard, who had a foot of his intestines removed, and the former N.H.L. player Kevin Dineen, who played 16 seasons after learning he had Crohn’s.
Michael Kappelman, a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of North Carolina who has treated Baker since she was 15, said his patients’ goals typically revolve around making sure the disease does not derail their dreams of going to college, getting married, having children or pursuing a career.
But going to the Olympics? When he started treating Baker, Kappelman said, he was not at all sure that was realistic.
Baker, who was born and raised in Winston-Salem, N.C., can remember clearly when she started feeling poorly. It was February 2010, the same weekend she set her first two national age-group records, shortly before her 13th birthday. She complained of fatigue and was running a fever. When lab tests came back inconclusive, her pediatrician, Barbara Clifford, referred her to a gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy. It was Baker’s first; since then she has had more than half a dozen.She learned of her diagnosis by accident. Feeling too ill to sit in class, Baker had sought refuge in the office of her father, then the head of the lower school at Forsyth Country Day, where she was a student
Baker in eighth grade, when her medical issues caused her to lose more than 10 pounds off her already thin frame. CreditKimberley Baker
“This is so bad, one of the worst stories ever,” she said. “I was on his email and an email popped up from my pediatrician saying the diagnosis.”
Baker in eighth grade, when her medical issues caused her to lose more than 10 pounds off her already thin frame. CreditKimberley Baker
“This is so bad, one of the worst stories ever,” she said. “I was on his email and an email popped up from my pediatrician saying the diagnosis.”
Baker in eighth grade, when her medical issues caused her to lose more than 10 pounds off her already thin frame. CreditKimberley Baker
“This is so bad, one of the worst stories ever,” she said. “I was on his email and an email popped up from my pediatrician saying the diagnosis.”
When Dr. Kappelman, in North Carolina, found out that Baker had made the Olympic team, he said he called his wife and his parents and then stepped outside his office and announced the news “as if an amazing thing had happened to my own child.”
Baker’s experience on other international trips has made her adept at filling out the medical forms required by the World Anti-Doping Agency and packing her medical kit, including syringes and extra dosages of her medicine in case of emergency. The super bacteria in the waters off Rio do not worry her; Baker knows from gastrointestinal disorders.
There’ve been times where I’ve said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to go on an international team,’ but somehow it’s worked out,” said Baker, who reported this week to a pre-Olympic training camp in San Antonio. “I’ve gotten healthy enough to swim well.”
Well enough to grace the biggest international stage in sports.
“What this means to me,” Baker said, tearing up again, “is on a whole ’nother level.”