July 2005 Archives

Get up at around 10.00am on a Sunday. Feel OK, no immediate stomach problems. Have breakfast and take soluble fiber supplement as usual.

No urge to go to bathroom. Usually have urge in morning, straight after breakfast. If no urge in morning then will be no urge for the rest of the day.

Still no bathroom urges. Go to bathroom anyway as sometimes no urge does not mean no need to go to bathroom. Nothing happens in bathroom.

Feel OK until about 12.00pm. Start feeling tightness in stomach and bloated. By about 4.00pm feel tight around stomach area and as if intestines are tense.

Get through rest of day feeling grim. Go to bed. Wake up, have breakfast, go to bathroom a minimal amount. Still feel tight and tense around stomach.

Repeat over around 500 or so days of my life, and as far into the future as you can bear to look.

Two thoughts - firstly, if you would really rather that I didn't write about my bodily functions and think it's all a bit disgusting, well tough - this is my life, this is my greatest misery, and who the hell am I supposed to talk to.

And secondly, I don't know how long I can keep doing this, over, over and over. I'm so tired of it all. And so unhappy.

Just a reminder to everyone in the UK that next week (18-25 July) is Gut Week, a national campaign to raise awareness of digestive problems, including IBS.

You can visit the Gut Week website for a free information pack (if you live in the UK) and to read more about the campaign. There's also advice about diet, lifestyles etc and details of a helpline for sufferers.

Feeling better again now. Honestly, is like being half a normal healthy person and half a completely decrepit person whose intestines refuse to conform.

I suppose the key to sanity is to enjoy the good parts and accept the bad parts - but not too much. I worry when I still hear IBS sufferers are told to "just learn to live with it". Of course, in a way that's exactly what we have to do, but that shouldn't be the FIRST thing we are told to do - it shouldn't be the doctor's first response.

We should receive advice about diet, about medications, about fiber supplements, about support groups, about clinical studies, about supplements, about hypnotherapy.

And then, maybe, if none of that works, then we should be told to learn to live with it. But only then. Otherwise it's just giving up before we've even started.

Had some pretty insane pain on Friday and then through the weekend. Was so bad Friday that I was actually swearing out loud, which doesn't happen often (I am a good girl).

Then today has been bad again, colon not working properly and feeling like a large mongoose is trying to make its way through my digestive system in the most convoluted manner possible.

Spent about half an hour this afternoon trying to decide whether I should eat a banana - sometimes eating helps, and sometimes it doesn't. Eventually decided not to eat the banana. You see how high level my life is? You see the subtlety of the questions upon which I must pass judgement every day? You see just how incapable I would be of anything resembling a normal life?

At least the mongoose seems to have got wherever he was going. Perhaps he would like a banana.

I watched a program last night about allergies, and it featured one girl who was allergic to everything from fruit and nuts to bees and grass. If she came into contact with one of her allergens she'd immediately go into anaphylactic shock and start suffocating, semi-conscious, until someone injected her with adrenaline.

At one point she went into shock because someone sitting next to her opened a horse chestnut.

This made me think about two things. First - I may be made miserable by IBS but at least I do not have to worry about dying if I accidentally look at a chestnut. And for this I should be grateful.

And second - why in the name of all that is holy are people so reluctant to believe that food could cause IBS when people can have such violent reactions to it? Surely if someone can risk death just be eating a peanut it's not that much of an imagination leap to say that some IBS symptoms may be caused by food intolerance.

There are many people who do find this hard to accept, however (mainly distant aunties who are trying to make us eat something like pizza because "a little bit won't hurt us, don't be silly").

I suppose it's because we need food to live, and so we think of it as a life-giving bounty rather than something that can harm us. But it clearly can harm us, so maybe our attitudes need to change.