Talking to Friends 

If you’ve had to miss school, or make lots of trips to the bathroom or nurse’s office, your friends might be curious. They might ask you questions that you aren’t sure you want to answer. If that’s the case, remember that you don’t have to share anything you don’t want to—you have a right to ​privacy​.

Keeping information about your health ​private​ is a choice that you get to make for yourself. That means that you can choose to share only the things that you want to with your friends. If you want to, when someone asks you what’s going on, you can just tell them something like “I had a stomach ache,” “I was sick,” or “I just wasn’t feeling well.”

If you want to explain your IBD to your friends, you can do that too! You get to decide what you are comfortable sharing. They might have questions about what it means, or if it’s contagious. You can tell them that it’s a disease that affects your digestive system, but it’s not contagious and you have strategies to help you deal with it.