In-perfection is the true beauty

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Coming soon! #Leathercrafting #handcrafted #handmade #wallet #Billfold #classic #handstitch
Custom order, made a Hua Wei p1 Phone case along with a cable holder.  #Leathercrafting #handmade #handcrafted #leather #handstitch

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corterleather:

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A lot of you know her as Miss Corter, but most folks call my girlfriend “Jocelyn”. Jocelyn has Crohn’s Disease, which is an autoimmune disease of the GI tract. It causes her intestines to swell up so much that she can’t absorb any nutrients from the food she eats (among other things). 
It sounds scary, but Miss Corter had been in remission using an arthritis medication called Remicade since she was 13 to treat the inflammation. However in early 2012 it stopped working as well and she was taken off of it. See, Crohn’s is mostly treated with drugs designed for other diseases, and the doctor’s aren’t really fond of keeping patients on these medications if they’re not doing what they’re supposed to (because, for example, very little research has been done on the long term effects of an intense arthritis drug on a 13 year old girl). People with Crohn’s respond very differently to this wide array of different drugs, and there is no cure or definitive path to remission. The new drugs they gave her didn’t work.
In April and May of last year we started spending a lot of extra time in hospitals around the city. Once her Crohn’s flared, other things like her childhood Asthma and anemia came back as well. Because of the swelling, food stopped working. She lost 30 pounds in a matter of weeks because her body couldn’t process anything. I now joke that she looked like a bobble head because she was so very tiny, but yea…she looked like a fucking bobble head. It was super scary. 
I spent a good chunk of 2012 splitting my time between the hospital and the workshop. Because ever Crohn’s patient responds uniquely, a lot of the treatment is more or less “take this and see what happens”. In late July, during what would be her most recent week-long hospital stay, a new doctor finally decided to try putting her back on her old medicine. Though it was a higher dosage, it worked immediately. 7 months of agonizing pain came to an end with the snap of a finger, and the road to recovery began. 
In the next 2 months she put the weight back on and started looking healthy by the holidays (though wheezy…the Asthma seems to be here to stay). I believe it was 12 hours after she hit normal weight that she decided to run a half marathon in support of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation (CCFA) and their research involving this disease. She’s running in Chicago in June with Team Challenge, and here’s what we’re doing:
The Shit Happens bracelets are an ode to what many Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis patients go through every day with a smile on their face, the good and the bad. In order for this to be a sustainable product in the Corter catalogue, all profit is going to the CCFA in Jocelyn’s name to fund research for a cure- that’s $21 per bracelet. Most importantly, these bracelets show support for folks with these diseases fighting a silent battle, because most usually keep it to themselves. Wear one for a few days, and I guarantee you’ll find you know more Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis patients than you’d ever imagined.