Monthly Archives: June 2006

I was thinking today about one of the reasons why the “all in your head” attitude to IBS gets people so annoyed. There are a number of good reasons for this, a major one being the fact that dismissing IBS as psychosomatic has long been a way to belittle the symptoms and enable other people to tell us to calm down rather than admitting that we might need something in the way of, I don’t know, treatment.

But perhaps the most infuriating thing about this attitude is the fact that it is one of the finest examples of “Doctor knows best”, completely-impossible-to-argue-with logic that I have ever come across.

You visit your doctor. You explain that you have been suffering from bad stomach pain and diarrhea. Your doctor says “Ah yes, that’s probably a result of emotional tension and psychological problems. You need to see a psychiatrist.”

You stare at your doctor blankly. You don’t feel mentally ill – if you were depressed you’d feel miserable, but you’re not miserable. If you were schizophrenic you might be paranoid, but you’re not paranoid; if you were obsessive-compulsive you might be washing your hands 20 times a day, but you’re not.

You live a normal, healthy life, and hold down a job, and see your friends, and feed your goldfish. You’ve never thought to yourself “Maybe I’m mentally ill. Must get that checked out.” And your friends have never said “Sophie seems a bit weird – maybe she’s mentally ill. Must get her checked out.”

In fact, you’ve never shown any signs of mental illness before, except, apparently, for the stomach pain and diarrhea. And despite the fact that your head feels fine, and you’ve never felt mentally ill, and you’ve never shown any signs of mental illness whatsoever, your doctor now decides you’re mentally ill. And why? Because your bowels aren’t working properly.

You’ve got to admire the logic in that – bowels aren’t working properly, diagnosis: mental problems. Lungs aren’t working properly, diagnosis: over-attentive mother and a tendency to watch too much television. No, wait a minute, my mistake – if your lungs aren’t working properly then it means that you’ve got something wrong with your lungs. Only bowels can be used for psychological diagnoses.

And so we end up with a situation where our doctors decide that we as IBS sufferers have less knowledge of our own mental health than they do – we as IBS sufferers have failed to spot our own mental illness, have failed to identify even the slightest hint of psychological disturbance, but they as doctors have reached deep into our psyches and have spectacularly diagnosed the problem that we didn’t even know was there, hasn’t shown up as any kind of mental problem, and only produces symptoms in our guts. Doctor knows best.

No wonder we get a bit miffed from time to time.

(Just in case there is anyone reading this who is now thinking to themselves “Oh no, maybe I’m secretly mentally ill”, the idea of IBS as a psychological disorder has been widely and soundly discredited, despite some doctors failing to keep up to date with this fact.)

One of my old friends from school is getting married next month, which is obviously very good news and I’m very happy for her. Unfortunately, as a loyal and committed IBS sufferer I have a range of things to worry about before the wedding, and rather than just popping along to the church and then strolling casually to the reception, it’s a little bit more complicated. Why?

Well firstly, because I might be in pain. That might be pain that comes on for half an hour or so and goes away, in which case I’m fine, and I’ll just grit my teeth and make small talk with random people and get through it. Or it might be mild pain throughout the day, in which case I’ll grit my teeth and make small talk and then collapse in a heap once it’s over.

Or it might be excruciating, mind-numbing pain, in which case I just won’t be able to go. But perhaps the worst kind of pain is the pretty-bad-but-not-disabling kind of pain, where I’ll have to sit down and make a decision about whether I should just not go, or whether I should go anyway and pretend to be happy and healthy all day while feeling like I want to drop dead.

And secondly, of course, I might need a bathroom. I’m fairly “lucky” in this respect compared to other sufferers in that it’s actually quite rare for me to need the loo after I’ve got through the first few hours of the morning, but it still happens sometimes. And any kind of public gathering of a few hundred people is really not the place to get the runs. There’ll be queues, and no paper, and people trying to pretend they’re not listening as you flush the loo seven times and make highly inappropriate groaning noises.

And then thirdly, there’ll be all those random people. I’m socially questionable at the best of times, but with IBS as well it makes it that much harder. You’re having a lovely chat about the flowers or the weather or your work life or whatever, and you watch in horror as the conversation gradually steers itself to an IBS-related area. “So, why do you work from home?”, someone will ask, or “Hey, Bob told me you run websites, that’s exciting – what are they about?”

“Because my bowel likes to torture me with constipation that knows no bounds”, I reply. “And the websites are all about poo.”

But, oh well, what can you do. It’s their wedding day – just be happy.

Most of us IBS sufferers know the drill. You’ve been in pain for weeks on end, your stomach is killing you, and you go into the office or the classroom day after day after day and no-one offers to help you. And then someone comes in with a cold and gets surrounded by well-wishers before they’ve even sat down.

And as if that wasn’t enough, they then milk it for all it’s worth. “Oh, I’ll struggle on,” they say, “I’ll somehow make it through,” because obviously they are so important that the whole place would fall apart without them, and they’ll manfully find a way to cope with the incredible agony that comes with a blocked-up nose and some phlegm.

Humph, I say. And bah humbug. You know what the problem is? It’s invisible illnesses. If you get a cold, everybody knows it because you sneeze at regular intervals. “Look at me, poor old me”, say the sneezes. “Sympathy to come in this direction.”

If you have IBS, you just don’t have this. Sure, sometimes you have to run to the bathroom quickly, but people just laugh at that. Your greatest moments of agony are experienced alone, in a locked stall, out of sight of everyone. Even when you’re walking around in constant pain, no-one can see it, so no-one offers to help. It’s that simple.

It seems to me that if a human being is the product of a higher power, they kind of got interrupted half-way through sorting out the pain signals. They had just decided that pain would be a great way to let you know that something needed fixing, and then the doorbell rang, so they never got to the second part – working out how to show exactly where the pain was, and exactly how you should fix it.

If I have a stomach ache, I think my stomach should glow purple. If my intestines are killing me, I want bright fluorescent stripes across my gut. They should vary in brightness according to how bad the pain is, and they should be blatantly obvious to everyone.

I would then walk into the office and people would turn away from the Pathetic Little Person with a Cold and gasp in awe at the Incredible Heart of Courage of the Fluorescent-Stomached Girl. That’d show them who really deserved the help.

Right – finally I am again living in a world where men are men and intestines are intestines rather than instruments of torture. Hurray.

I’ve been quite strict about keeping to a going to bed/getting up schedule over the last week and that seems to have done the trick. It’s still annoying to have to tailor your life around your stomach, but if it avoids the kind of experience I had last weekend then who really cares, it’s worth it.

I got to the lovely stage where (this next bit is not to be read by people of a nervous disposition) it felt like the waste was actually crawling further and further up inside me, and the middle of my stomach was starting to feel like it would much rather explode than push anything downwards. (Look, I’m sorry if this is disgusting, but as I’ve said before – this is a blog about irritable BOWEL syndrome, so I’m gonna have to talk about bowels. I wish it was a blog about ladybirds or something, but it isn’t.)

I think that “three-day constipation” feeling is one of my most hated feelings in the whole wide world. It feels like your stomach is constantly tensed and nothing you do can relax it, and the only way you’re gonna get relief is if you go to the bathroom, and you have no way of knowing when that miraculous event will occur. Yuck, and, if I may say so, bleurghh.

Still, gotta count my blessing – I feel fine today, I felt fine yesterday, and I may well feel fine tomorrow. That’ll do for now.