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(A) Winter is my favorite season. I like wearing all my comfy clothes, but I look forward to winter mostly because I get to make soup all the time. (B) I love bundling up with a steaming bowl of soup to keep me warm. One winter, a friend of mine was coming over to play video games, so I reheated the pot of yesterday’s batch and wolfed two down massive bowls in quick succession.

(D) Twenty minutes into our gaming session, my stomach started gurgling, and an unfamiliar pressure began building in my guts. I profusely apologized to my friend, who had driven an hour to see me, told him I needed to go to bed.

Hours later, I awoke in the middle of the night to searing pain, my stomach visibly bloated and my entire body spasming every 20-30 seconds. (C) I crawled across the house to wake my dad, who worriedly drove me to the hospital. It took longer than it should, as I had to stop every few minutes to dry-heave on the side of the road.

(E) That’s how I found out I had Crohn’s Disease; that had been my first (and sadly, not last) flare-up.