April 2005 Archives

The other day I was reading the blog of a British poet who has recently died from breast cancer. She kept a blog for about a year or two before she died, and at one point she writes: "Life is suffering. But not all the time."

And I've been thinking about that a lot. I've also been thinking about a history book I once read, a history of the 20th century, which said that we in the year 2000 are the first people in the whole history of the world who expect to suffer no pain.

Whatever is wrong with us, whatever illnesses we collect or disorders we suffer from, we expect to be cured, or at least treated and drugged to within an inch of our lives. Even when we are dying we expect to be comfortable.

But do we have the right? Somehow I find it much more hopeful to agree with the British poet. You can't wipe out suffering, you can't avoid pain. You're gonna get sick, love someone who dies, struggle through the suffering to get to the good parts. But there usually are good parts, and there's always a glint of light to keep us sane.

Because life is suffering. But not all the time.

Feeling a bit more cheery now. Oh the wonderful cycle of pain that is IBS.

Stomach is still being slightly bizarre, but at least it has stopped being painful. If IBS was only about stomach discomfort and weird gurgling noises (like I've got at the moment) then that would be no problem - it's the PAIN that really grinds you down.

Luckily I don't get pain more than perhaps three or four days a month now, but my stomach does have a comprehensive range of oddities which it uses to fill in the in-between times.

Take yesterday for example. No pain, but for about two hours in the afternoon it kind of felt like I had a balloon being inflated and then deflated and then inflated again in my lower intestine.

As far as I am aware I don't keep any balloons in my lower intestine, so God knows what was causing that.

I've also been getting these kind of mini spasms where I can feel a small section of intestine wake up, perform a high-energy section from 'Grease', and then go back to sleep again.

I have startlingly original bowels.

Hmm. Stomach has improved somewhat - not to the levels of a normal person but I stopped being normal about 15 years ago so that's probably setting my sights too high.

Still, what I wouldn't do for my old stomach back. Can you believe I never used to think about food or going to the bathroom, I just used to go when I needed to and then forget about it? Seems like a different lifetime.

And it doesn't help being surrounded by normal people. The guy in the flat above me has been very happy lately, laughing all the time, lots of friends round, generally having a life. Bastard. He seems to be one of these people to whom life comes very easily. Not to me it doesn't.

It's not that my life is so bad, but everything is made so much harder by my IBS. I sometimes wonder how other people would cope. What would upstairs guy do if I gave him my IBS tomorrow? Would he stop laughing? Lose the friends? Or would he just battle on regardless?

Sometimes I think I have been very brave and dealt with a lot of pain very well, and other times I think that I have been pretty pathetic and missed out on a lot of things which I should have made myself do, stomachache or no stomachache.

But then, maybe I underestimate myself. Maybe upstairs guy would not even have made it this far. Who knows.

Well that was quite painful. After around six whole weeks of a perfectly normal, standard issue stomach I've just had a week and a half of swathes of pain and gut disasters. Lord knows why.

Seem to be finally coming out the other side now, but that was really not a whole lot of fun. And the trouble is that once you're in an attack there's really not much you can do about it.

Generally I choose between going to bed and trying to sleep through it (that's if I'm not at work or on the bus or something, in which case I try to avoid sleeping unless absolutely necessary) or just carrying on as normal and trying to distract myself with work or writing an email.

Of course, if it's a really, REALLY bad attack then these choices are removed and I have to just go and sit in the bathrooom whether I like it or not.

Perhaps the worst thing is that when I have an extended spell of feeling OK, like I did for those six weeks, I start planning what I might like to do. And then my IBS say "Nope, don't think so matey" and puts a stop to it.

Oh well. At least I'm OK today. I should thank my lucky sheep. (Thank you, Arthur.)