Monthly Archives: June 2005

OK, feeling a little more human today. I’ve recently started using acacia fiber, which is a soluble fiber supplement made specifically for IBS sufferers.

It’s actually quite easy to take – it’s just a simple white powder which dissolves fairly easily in water or other liquids, and then when you drink it it really has no taste or thickness. It’s designed to help both constipation and diarrhea, so here’s hoping.

I know that some of the other fiber supplements on the market can cause problems for IBS sufferers – psyllium-containing products can irritate the stomach sometimes, and other products contain artificial sweeteners or colors which serve absolutely no purpose and just cause bowel spasms.

IBS has been pretty bad lately. The past week has included: perhaps one hour of fairly intense pain, at least six or seven hours of fair to moderate levels of discomfort, intransigent constipation on at least a couple of days, plus the usual bizarre intestinal feelings such as spasms and weird stuff.

And this is one week of my life, 15 years after first having IBS symptoms. Fifteen years later I still have to struggle and crawl and battle through my life instead of living it.

And the world somehow expects me to do just that. It always feels like whatever pain I am feeling or whatever is wrong with my body, the rest of the world blithely expects me to just carry on, just get on with it. That peculiar kind of British wartime mentality that said we don’t care if you’ve got a bayonet embedded in your spine, you’re to carry on living and not complain.

I swear to God if someone once said to me “Dear God, I can’t believe the amount of suffering you’ve been through, you deserve a medal” I would be pathetically grateful. But no-one ever does. They just expect me to turn up or earn money or be happy and then are totally bemused when I am not.

I’ve had a stomach ache for 15 years, I have to spend hours in the bathroom, I can’t eat hardly anything without feeling ill, I can’t travel, and sometimes it feels like someone is stabbing me in the side with a lance.

Yes, but why are you crying?

Everyone knows that the best scientific test in the world is the double-blind, controlled test where only one aspect of the test is changed at a time – the mouse is given venison to eat instead of cheese, but it sill lives in the same house with the same mice friends, and there’s another identical mouse who’s living in the identical situation but only gets to eat cheese.

That’s not the clearest explanation of that I’ve ever seen, but hopefully you know what I mean. And I often wish there were two versions of me so I could do a double-blind controlled test on my bowels.

Whatever you change with IBS, there are always going to be other variables. You might be stressed or not stressed, you have to eat lots of different things, you have to get up at different times and breathe different air and all the rest of it.

So when you find something that helps your IBS, you have to ask yourself – is it really this cheese that is helping my IBS? Or is just the fact that I didn’t eat oranges last Tuesday when I normally do?

You just get to the point where nothing really makes sense and you have no idea what anything really does to your body. If only there were a better way. Cloning, perhaps. I’ll look into it.