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embarrassing tales page two

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Two IBS episodes - last night and tonight, after eating out at restaurants with friends. Last night: I don't think it was because I ate so much at Wallaby's but that I drank three glasses of Mountain Dew with the meal. After I dropped my friend off I suddenly felt that old familiar stabbing irritable bowel syndrome cramp while in traffic.

I got off the main road and made a beeline for the nearby junior high school since I figured it was dark enough to do my business on the grass. (If you have IBS you know that you don't always get an appropriate choice of where to launch.) Well, as soon as I stepped outside the car I was hit with another especially nasty cramp. I stood there gritting my teeth and clenching my sphincter in a floodlit area in front of the school.

I looked up to see a surveillance camera pointing in my direction (set up, obviously, to monitor student activity during the day and trespassers at night). I willed the cramping to stop so I could scamper off into the shadows and do my deed. I goose-stepped several dozen yards (you know the IBS walk - your butt cheeks clenched to the point of numbness) to a chain link fence when I felt the next cramp coming on.

I yanked my pants down and squatted in a lightning motion only a millisecond before my bowels gave out. Sweet relief gave way to a mounting unease as I realized I had lost my car keys. I wiped as well as I could with the few paper napkins I had and stuffed the rest up my butt crack (an IBS sufferer's insurance against a sudden sneak attack while relaxing after the main battle).

I retraced my journey from poop site to car to poop site several times but the keys were nowhere to be found. (A horror movie started playing in my head about wide-eyed school children gathered around a huge smelly pile of crap and mucous. One of them finds some car keys close by which are later traced back to me by school officials and police.)

I could feel panic rising - this could really end badly. In a moment of clarity I surmised I threw the keys down when I squatted in that moment of abject single-mindedness. On my hands and knees in the semi-darkness I frantically groped the dewy grass in the vicinity of the steaming heap.

I heard a familiar jingle. Thank the Dear Lord! The keys! I gathered them quickly and scurried back to the car, a wad of tissue between my buttocks, wondering as I drove home if the whole saga was caught on videotape.

Tonight: Four of us at the Lotus Garden celebrating a friend's birthday. They serve huge plates of food there and it's very good so I commenced filling my face and drinking multiple cokes. Because I'm stupid!

Before I even finished my veggies and tofu I suddenly felt that old invisible horse kick me in the gut. Flexing my bum (since, as any good IBS victim knows, if you relax even for an instant, you can literally fill your undies to capacity), I waddled to the restroom which, thankfully, was both unoccupied and clean (IBS heaven!).

I prayed for nobody else to come in as I loudly gave a resonant blast on the tuba and spray-painted the toilet bowl, offering a silent thanks when the violence ended. I returned to the party table only to have the birthday girl inquire (rather too loudly), 'Where the hell have you been?' It seems you lose track of time during IBS events. Right now, as I type, my stomach is purring intermittently like a kitten an hour after an elimination that was mostly mucous. Do you know this feeling?


Oh my God! The only thing I could say about my situation. Well I am lucky enough not to have IBS, and I do sympathize with those who do, including my boyfriend. I see the agony and stuff that he has to go though, and sometimes I wonder if he can take the stuff he goes through.

He has the worst IBS-D (diarrhea). When we go out we have to make sure we plan out everything, just in case of one of his attacks.

This past summer we were taking a drive to the country to visit my grandfather's cabin where there is no bathroom in sight. He was pretty sure that he'd be fine, I told him before we left the house not to eat too much, but he ended up making himself a South-Western omelet. The first thing I thought was 'Oh no'.

Boy was I right, on the way there (like 10 minutes away from the cabin) he began to complain of real bad cramps. I was like wait till we get there. So he kept driving, but it got way worse. We had to stop!

But where? We were on some dirt road in the middle of nowhere, he didn't want to go out in the icky looking bushes, I mean who would? Doesn't everyone have the fear of going to the bathroom in the woods, and have the fear of something crawling up to or flying at your behind?

Well he waited until it was too late to get out of the car because when he got out there it exploded in his white shorts and down his legs. Yuck what a mess. I was grossed out.

He had to go to the side to finish up which wasn't pretty. Then we took a blanket from the trunk covered the seat, and we had to go to my grandpa and ask him for an extra set of clothes because of the accident. We were so embarrassed. As for the old clothes, into the camp fire they went.

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