Fairy Wings, Stomach Aches, and the Food Network: a Conversation with Gabriella Schmitt

Gabriella Schmitt

Check out this photo by Gabriella Schmitt taken at a My Chemical Romance (MCR) concert in May:

I love its vibrant colors against the dark background and its movement and energy. When we spoke, Gabriella showed the same dynamic attitude as she quoted some of her favorite MCR lyrics,

You're unbelievable, ah, so unbelievable, ah, you ruin everything, oh, you better go home. I'm unbelievable, yeah, I'm undefeatable, yeah, let's ruin everything, blast it to the back row.

She told me that MCR started as a punk/rock/emo band to help teens avoid suicide. They are now mega stars and she is passionate about their music.

The lyrics seemed a little frantic or fatalistic to me. I asked Gabriella if chronic pain makes her feel this way—or just makes her feel angry. “Pain doesn’t make me angry. Sleep deprivation makes me angry.” she replied.  As it turns out, sleeping is one of her favorite activities, along with many others that help her get by. Some of the other things she loves include, “friends, cold weather, sex, music, night, people who are as random as I am, fellow-freaks, rain, honesty, roses, kinkiness, and photography.”

At 22, Gabriella has rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a disease that slowly eats away the tissues that connect bones together, and Crohn’s disease. When I first started chatting with Gabriella over the phone and via Facebook a year ago, I assumed I knew exactly what she was going through. Like Gabriella, I got RA when I was a toddler, but she told me that she actually feels the effects of Crohn’s disease much more.

With Crohn’s, the digestive tract doesn’t work normally — it causes sharp and sometimes constant stomach spasms. In some cases, parts of the intestines need to be removed. Gabriella explained that “Crohn’s keeps you going back and forth to the bathroom, which may cause dehydration. It even makes it pointless to try to go to the ER because there really is nothing to take for the pain. They just run tests that make you feel worse.”  Despite stomach issues and frequent lack of appetite, Gabriella states that “Food is one of my passions. I probably watch the Food Network more than anyone else--Japanese, Chinese and Italian being my favorites.”

Effects from Crohn’s and RA have also led to many complications with her vision and with different parts of her eyes. Last year, she had a cataract surgery that restored partial vision in her right eye, but she still needed surgery for her left eye. There was a big delay in getting the second cataract surgery because her two eye specialists did not agree about how to proceed. “So, I’m pretty much just sitting around with terrible vision to humor [them],” Gabriella told me.

In our chats, she and I have spent a lot of time comparing doctors’ attitudes — ranging from the cold, cocky ones to the nice, but absent-minded ones. She had this to say about one of her specialists, “Everyone who sees that doctor agrees she’s [mean]. But,” she emphasized, “at least she’s good at what she does. She isn’t very gentle either. I remember one of the first times I saw her I had an arthritis flare up and instead of asking me to look to the side, she turned my head for me. She apologized after I screamed... which might actually be the only sign of emotion she’s ever shown.” This is one of the reasons I like Gabriella. She is wry and direct, she always says what she means.

Besides MCR and The Food Network, Gabriella is also a big fan of the Twilight series. She quotes the character Bella as saying, “Time passes. Even when it seems impossible, even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.”

I can understand how a young woman who lives with chronic pain would identify with this passage. Twilight isn’t the only element of fantasy in her life; she recently got an intricate tattoo of a fairy with multi-faceted wings. I asked her if she believed in fairies and she said,

“I never really thought about it, but I like their spunkiness and their sweetness.”

Gabriella’s spunkiness and sweetness are reflected in her photography, with its vivid shots that capture people in animated moments. Here’s a photo she took of her uncle Gustavo with his dog Onyx:

Gabriella experiences a great deal of soreness and stiffness in moving around, but her photos really convey the vitality in her life. Looking forward, Gabriella hopes to travel and become even more immersed in her photography.

For the time being though, she lives with her parents in Weston, Florida. Her mother is from Venezuela and Gabriella is fluent in Spanish. I asked her what it feels like to be a young Latina with a disability.  “It’s weird because I am constantly forgetting I am a ‘minority’” Everyone is Latino where she lives, so it just feels normal to her.

But people do treat her differently because of her disability. This is how she says people view her: “It seems that everyone assumes you’re such a good and nice person, like you’re incapable of doing drugs and having sex...” When a recent Crohn’s flare-up caused her to be hospitalized, the nurses were shocked when her boyfriend of two years, Jake, came to visit her. “They were so surprised I had a boyfriend.”

When she stops having to go to the hospital so often, Gabriella’s plan is to start college and major in psychology. There is no long-term solution for Crohn’s, but she can keep her symptoms somewhat at bay by treating it with steroids.  She tells me, “I only feel disabled when I think about things like how I will get around a college campus on my own.”

Fortunately, I know a thing or two about assistive technology that might help with that and I’m going to keep in touch with her to help her figure it out. And knowing Gabriella’ fairy spunkiness, I’m sure he’ll figure out how to grow the wings she needs and have an amazing college experience.

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