ABC News correspondent McFadden first experienced the excruciating pain of Crohn's disease, which her friends euphemistically dubbed "George," in her sophomore year of college.



"They weren't going to say, 'Did you have 15 diarrhea attacks today?'" the journalist says in a 1994

People magazine interview. "So, instead, they'd ask me, 'How's George?'"



After a bout of internal bleeding in 1979, she had 15 feet of intestine removed. McFadden, who now works to raise awareness about the disease with the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA), has been mostly in remission ever since.