Mark Millar battles Crohn's Disease

In a Newsarama interview yesterday, comic writer Mark Millar revealed he has been battling Crohn's Disease:

Crohn’s is basically an intestinal disorder that’s entirely down to genetics. There were a couple of people in my family with it so I knew how serious it was immediately. My brother had the last rites and has had several ops and my uncle died as a result of complications. So I knew it wasn’t good news.

In simple terms, it’s your intestines eating themselves and there’s, broadly speaking, two types. The first is that you spend your life in the bathroom. The second is that your blood-results are all over the place, your organs get poisoned and you hurt from head to toe. I fall into the latter category and this is why it was so hard to diagnose for a long time because these inflammatory markers can indicate anything from cancer to multiple sclerosis. I spent what felt like months in MRI machines and so on, but it wasn’t until I ‘fessed up to Marvel and told them how sick I was that I had a definite diagnosis.

Over on the Millarworld forums, Millar has posted a message about supporting a breaking development in Crohn's Disease research:

You can read a little more about this in my Newsarama interview, but they basically need 700K for the human trials to start at the end of next year and they're about halfway there so far. Every penny they can get brings this forward a little more and so I'm going to do what I can to help raise cash for them. The first and most obvious thing is having them set up a paypal account for anyone here who can afford to donate even five bucks (though more would be great). I've got a few ideas how to help them, but this is a simple and direct one. Please spread the details around as, statistically, everybody's going to have at least one friend or relative in this situation and even the knowledge that a cure is possible will bring a little hope to these people.

The Professor's paypal address is jhermon@sgul.ac.uk

• Read the entire interview
  
• Read Millar's post on donating