October 2005 Archives

There's a new spoof news program coming out on BBC2, for which I have seen a couple of trailers. My TV guide magazine says that it is hilarious, but I've already decided not to watch. Why?

Because they've called one of their channels "IBS news". Man, that's funny. Can you imagine?! A news channel named after that illness that makes you poop yourself! You know, the one where you get the runs and the gas and everything - and we're calling a serious NEWS channel after it!

I laughed and laughed, and then I shot myself.

Well that was exciting. Even after all these years my IBS can still surprise me. It's not sitting still, no way, it's evolving, it's creative, it's hip and trendy and right in the now. Hurray (or, rather, hurroo).

I just had a particularly weird hour episode. It was kind of 30 seconds of fairly intense pain, then a dramatic and very audible gurgling of the gut, then a break for about three minutes, then another 30 seconds of pain, then gurgling, and so on, until after about an hour it managed to resolve itself into some painless diarrhea and that was that.

So what on earth was that about? My IBS episodes, the really bad ones, are generally about a half hour of fairly constant pain, certainly not three minute gaps in the middle. What was happening in those three minutes? Were the little IBS bugs giving it all they had in the 30 second parts and then having to stop for tea and biscuits?

Completely bizarre. And depressing, because just when you think you know what you're dealing with, you find you don't.

I sometimes feel that, with a condition such as IBS, it is necessary to set up some kind of motivational system in your head to keep you going. I tend to think of this in terms of cheerleading, having a little voice in your mind that has to keep saying "You can do it, just carry on a bit longer" and "One more day and your stomach'll be back to normal, you'll see. Just keep going".

This constant need to drag yourself out of despair can get pretty draining. I imagine my little cheerleaders (who I have decided to think of as hedgehogs, rather than proper cheerleaders, as 16 year-old girls would just laugh at me, and hedgehogs are more polite) are pretty exhausted by now.

"Just keep going" they are panting, "Just a little while longer", and then they collapse to the ground, several of them get run over by a passing lorry, and I have to carry on with depleted hedgehogs and a more feeble voice of encouragement.

If I ever run out of hedgehogs, well, I'm not sure what happens then. Hope is the last thing to die, they say, so maybe my hedgehogs will last for as long as I do.

I'll guess I'll find out in the end.

We all have hopes for the future - what we want to achieve, what kind of house we want to live in, whether we want to be married or have children or live as a hermit in Peru.

I don't really remember when I stopped having normal ambitions, but they've definitely gone.

My ambition in life is to be able to go to the toilet a) without pain b) on a somewhat regular basis (not too much, not too little) and c) without having to structure every last part of my life around this one lofty, unreachable, unimaginably heavenly ambition.

You can keep your houses and your cars and your husbands and your children, your money and your fame and your success. I just want a working bowel.

But I've probably set my sights far, far too high.