One of my favorite things about Uncovered is that no two HS journeys look the same. Some stories are about finally receiving a diagnosis. Others are about navigating surgery, motherhood, advocacy, or learning to love a body that has endured so much. This week's story offers something we haven't explored yet: what life can look like years into remission. I don’t mean to fan girl over this particular story because I love all my fellow warriors, but I must say, Cris is a bada$$. A well rounded bada$$ doing amazing things in the HS community. Cristina has lived with Hidradenitis Suppurativa for more than 27 years. After nearly two decades of living with Hurley Stage II and III HS, she committed herself to understanding her body's unique inflammatory triggers. Through years of patience, experimentation, setbacks, and persistence, she found a path that has helped her remain in remission for nine years. What I appreciate most about Cristina's story is her honesty. She doesn't present remission as a miracle or a finish line. Instead, she reminds us that living with a chronic illness is an ongoing relationship with our bodies, one built through curiosity, compassion, and adaptation. Whether your own journey includes medication, surgery, nutrition, lifestyle changes, or a combination of many different tools, I hope her story encourages you to stay curious and to remember that healing doesn't have to look the same for everyone.

Today, we're honored to share Cristina's story.

Nine Years in Remission: What I Wish I'd Known About Hidradenitis Suppurativa

I almost forget, most days, what it was like.

That's the strange gift of long remission, the further you get from the worst of it, the more it can start to feel like it happened to someone else. But I don't want to forget, and I don't want the people reading this who are still in it — still hiding scars, still making excuses for wincing when they sit down, still turning the lights off during sex — to think this got easy, or that it happened by accident. So let me back up.

Where It Started

I lived with hidradenitis suppurativa for eighteen years before I did anything meaningful about it. Stage 2 and 3, in four areas of my body, for most of my adult life. If you don't know HS, here's the short version: it's a chronic inflammatory skin condition that fills the body with boil-like abscesses, and scars, usually in the most private places, underarms, groin, breasts, but it can happen anywhere you have hair.  It's disfiguring, it's painful, and almost nobody talks about it, because almost nobody can see it. You can look completely fine in a dress and be in agonizing pain underneath it. I got very good at hiding it. Band-aids everywhere. Shorts over my swimsuit at the beach. Excuses for everything. I didn't tell people who'd known me my whole life what I was actually dealing with.

I finally hit my wall at thirty. That's when I found the Autoimmune Protocol community and started reading everything I could — The Hidden Plague, The Paleo Approach, every blog and forum thread I could find. I did a militant AIP elimination — six weeks, no cheating — and then spent months slowly reintroducing foods to figure out what was actually driving my inflammation. Gluten and nightshades were the big ones. Lactose, too. Sugar sent me sideways even in small amounts.

What followed was not a straight line. It was years of it. I documented the whole thing in real time on my blog, The Castaway Kitchen, as it unfolded, the wins, the flares, the relapses. A few Whole30s. A stretch of keto-paleo hybrid eating while I worked on balancing my hormones. Training as a nutritional therapy practitioner so I could actually understand the mechanisms behind what I was doing to my own body, not just follow rules. Slowly adding foods back, eggs, then rice, then some cheese (then took it out again), then, eventually, chickpeas. There were setbacks that had nothing to do with willpower: a bout of cellulitis that required antibiotics, which then triggered its own reaction. COVID and strep back to back that set off two flares in one month. Launching my second cookbook during a pandemic while my husband was deployed. I kept going. A cross-country move and a divorce in the same year my gut had never felt better, because HS never checks whether your life is calm before it decides to remind you it's still there.

Where I Am Now

It's 2026. I've been in remission for nine years.

I sold The Castaway Kitchen, the brand and business I built out of my own healing, in 2023. I wrote two bestselling cookbooks along the way. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I found the thing I didn't know I was looking for: a way to turn what HS took from me into something useful for other people living with it. These days I run operations for a national patient advocacy organization for hidradenitis suppurativa, building the programs, the events, the resources I wish had existed when I was googling my own symptoms alone at 2am, ashamed, certain I was the only one.

My diet today would be almost unrecognizable to the version of me who wrote that first militant elimination protocol. I'm still gluten-free, still dairy-free, still mostly nightshade-free but I eat potatoes now, without a second thought. I have real flexibility. My focus these days is less "what can I never eat again" and more protein, vegetables, and gentle, consistent movement. My HS has never been better managed than it is right now, and it's not despite loosening the reins it's partly because of it. Rigid restriction was necessary to find my footing. It isn't necessary to stay standing.

In 2023, I also added a GLP-1 medication into the mix. It helped me lose weight, yes, but what surprised me was what it did for my HS, inflammation dropped further, and I found I could tolerate a wider range of foods with more confidence than I'd had in years. It's not a replacement for everything else I've built; it's one more tool in a toolbox I've spent a decade assembling.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about remission: it isn't a finish line, and it isn't linear. Even now, HS isn't actually my biggest battle most days. Perimenopause is. My body is renegotiating its terms with me all over again, and I'm having to relearn some of the same lessons, listen to it, adjust, don't panic, don't assume one hard week undoes nine years of work. That's the part I most want people newer to this journey to hear managing a chronic illness is not something you solve once. It's something you keep doing, in different forms, for the rest of your life. But doable is doable. Nine years in, I'm living proof that it gets to be more than survivable, it gets to be genuinely good.

If you're in the thick of it right now — hiding your scars, exhausted from another flare, wondering if this is just your life — I need you to hear this: it will not always look like this. It took me eighteen years to start, and nine more to get here. But I got here. You can too.

By: Cristina Maria Curp

 

YOUR TURN

Cristina's story reminds us that healing is about continuing to learn, adapt, and care for ourselves through every season our bodies move through. Her journey also highlights something that often gets lost in conversations about HS: there is no single path forward. For some people, treatment centers around biologics or surgery. For others, nutrition, movement, hormone management, stress reduction, or a combination of approaches become important pieces of the puzzle. Most of us find ourselves building a toolbox rather than discovering a single answer. Thank you, Cristina, for sharing your journey with such honesty and generosity. Your willingness to reflect on nearly three decades of living with HS, including the setbacks as well as the victories, offers hope without unrealistic promises. That kind of hope is invaluable. And to everyone reading this, whether you're newly diagnosed or have been living with HS for decades, remember this: your journey doesn't have to look like anyone else's to be meaningful. Keep asking questions. Keep advocating for yourself. Keep believing that better days are possible, even if they arrive one small step at a time. If you'd like to share your own HS story, we'd be honored to feature your voice in the Uncovered series. Because every story has the power to help another warrior feel a little less alone.

Keep up with Cristina on social media.

FB:Cristina Maria Curp

IG:cristimadewhole 

TikTok: critina_maria_curp

Sending you healing vibes. The EmpoweredHSWarrior.