men suffering diarrhea - page three
The tale of...Mark
After reading some of the postings on this site I can honestly say I share many of the same problems. I am a 23 year-old male. About two years ago I left my country (Australia) and moved to Mexico City to be with my girlfriend. Needless to say I ate like a pig when I first arrived. A week into my stay I got very sick. You know how the doctors are when the Westerners get sick in Mexico..."Oh, you have been overeating and you're not used to the food, take this anti-diuretic pill and you will be fine".
So I went back to my country for a while because after a month I was feeling worse than ever. Back in Australia my doctors prescribed me with drug after drug, all to no avail. So I bit my pride and came back to Mexico. I got sicker...and then sicker...and then some more. After losing almost 10 kilos in nine months I said enough was enough and I saw a gastroenterologist.
So I had an endoscopy...stomach good...intestine good...the biopsy showed I had helicobacter bacteria...and so I began my treatment for that. However the complication arose because I left it incorrectly treated for so long and now I have irritable bowel syndrome.
I'm sure I do not have to go into all the details about how my life has changed and how depressed I feel sometimes. I feel pathetic. Some days I wake up and I'm laying in bed and I can hear the gastric juices making endless noises (a sign that I'm up for about a week of chronic abdominal pain and diarrhea). Anything and I mean anything can trigger it - stress, the wrong food (no matter how careful I am), a vitamin pill...God...
So I began to develop other secondary symptoms because of the lack of proper nourishment....sores on my tongue (I have read in Chinese medicine that this is a reflection of the colon)...inability to get over colds fast, cramps in the upper part of my stomach (those are the worst, I cry for hours on end because nothing, not even painkillers, can stop them). Drained of all my energy, darkness under the eyes, blood in my stool sometimes.
I have developed intolerances to many types of food and I fear I will never get my weight back. I am not a rich man and so seeing specialists every month is not an option for me. All the publicly available drugs like Dicetel have the opposite effect of calming my system down.
I could sit here and type for hours on all the horror stories I have had, from the chronic diarrhea in public places to the 4am visits to the emergency room only to find out that they can't do anything for me.
I have found some ways to control my symptoms. These are (and I hope someone else can be helped by these): stress management - eating smaller meals but divided throughout the day. Keeping a diary of what happens to help you find some kind of pattern in how your body works or reacts. A medication which is called Motilium (which helps slow down the rate of digestion so as to avoid diarrhea).
A tea made from gyuaba leaves (to stop diarrhea or at least help slow it down a bit) and also Echinacea to help my immune system. Yakult is too much in a delicate digestive system like mine, so I find acidophilus pills help restore my floral intestinal bacteria after a rough bout of IBS.
These measures might seem a bit unorthodox but believe me they work. The horrible part is that there is no cure for IBS, only treatments to help the symptoms and lifestyle changes. I don't care if I am never 100% again, all I ask for is 75% so I can live my life without pain and so much stress.
I want to say that there is also hope for people like us who suffer from this horrible type of pain. No-one could understand it unless they have had it. I don't ask for sympathy, in fact I want people to know that this will not stop my life. I will live to an old age without pain one day...
E-mail Mark: galletito[at]hotmail.com
The tale of...Mark
Well my story all began four years ago. Living in a town 30 miles away from work (due to the cost of living near my new job being too high) I had my initial meeting with IBS. There was a lot of stress at the time, my wife (just married) hated where we lived and so did I.
It all started innocently enough. I had a Chinese takeaway - they never did sit well with me but my wife loved them so I let her have her way, boy do I wish that I hadn't. I was in agony, not having a clue what it was and getting scared when it didn't go after three days. I thought I had food poisoning. I went to the doctor, a very impatient ex-army doctor who was more interested in me being overweight than giving a damn about my stomach cramps and loose stools.
Almost as suddenly as this began, it stopped, and I was OK. I put it down to experience (dodgy takeaway!) and moved on. Three weeks later it was back, and for no reason that I could tell. My symptoms lasted for a year this time, right over Xmas (which was the worst I had ever had).
I saw an emergency doctor on Boxing Day 1999 who sympathised but didn't have a clue. I even went to accident and emergency, and saw a very young doctor who gave me some Gaviscon and sent me home. Two days of sitting on the toilet doing the IBS prayer (a special prayer for the digestively-challenged! Sit on the toilet with your arms buried in the pit of your stomach and shout out for God to help you!).
And it was New Year’s Eve, 1999. Yes, the millennium. In desperation I tried my Dad's remedy (for everything from a toothache to a flat tyre) of Kaolin and Morphine. That did seem to ease it and I can remember sitting in an armchair at my wife's gran's house tasting the horrible taste in my mouth wondering when I would be high enough on the morphine!
After Xmas I decided that I had to get away from where we lived. I started a new job in the September of that year meaning I could move back to an area we knew. Things did seem to get a bit better (slowly) and I was not in as much pain. Slowly but surely I started to go to the pub with my team at lunch time, I even dared myself to try a Guinness! Heaven for 15 minutes, hell for three days! But by the November I was OK again, almost back to my pre-IBS days.
My wife fell pregnant in the January (hooray!) and things looked great. Then I had another attack, June 2001. Stupid of me. I had eaten fish and chips at lunchtime (very rare for me, but remember my tum was OK at the time) then felt a bit naughty and had a cream bun. I was OK if a bit stuffed.
Then my wife met me from work - "Let's go out for dinner!" she cried. "Oh great" I said, but it wasn't long before I was the one crying. One large burger with all the trimmings later and I was sitting at 5am next morning with stomach cramps from Slough (er...I mean hell!). This attack lasted just three months, but they weren't the best three months ever, trust me.
My son was born on the 28th September and my life changed totally, my IBS almost totally cleared up and apart from several small attacks (all my own fault, choc ice cream at the cinema, strong curries etc, HOW I MISS CURRY!) I had been completely fine. Thought I was over it.
Just to show how fine I was - I had moved jobs several times in this blissful period, bought a house, seen my parents through three knee operations (two for Mum, one for Dad in case you thought that my Dad was Jake the Peg or something!), seen my son develop dyspraxia, go through a bullying lawsuit (I was the victim!) in one job and also welcomed my new daughter into the world on the 7th April last year. I'd sorted out our finances, everything was just great.
THEN...Just before Xmas this year I tried some Latte coffee with my French boss. It was delicious, I kept having it, every other day or so. All OK.
THEN...I started getting more and more diarrhea, more slight cramps, nothing too bad but I was trying to lose weight (very successfully I might add) so put it down to hunger.
THEN...I got more into my new job, Project Manager at a very large US-based automotive company, they are everywhere, blue oval? I found it was quite stressful; all the senior management blamed me for everything!
THEN...My daughter contracted a stomach bug, I seemed to get it too. But much worse.
THEN...Whilst visiting a customer I was sitting at a hot desk when my bottom decided to see how fast it could make me run the 200 meters. Stomach cramps and an hour later I was on my way home to face a heady cocktail of diarrhea mixed with agony and large doses of embarrassment.
At the beginning of my long and probably anesthetising tale I had a very bad bout of food poisoning. It only lasted 24 hours but I was vomiting and having diarrhea at the same time. I have always thought that this was the cause of it but never been 100% sure. Has anyone else ever “caught” IBS like this?
I’d be glad to talk to any men around my age (29) who have had any experience. Women tend to suffer most from these types of things and I find that most groups do have a female bias (rightly so, they are by far the people who suffer the most frequently). However I find that dealing with my symptoms are particularly hard as I am the sole breadwinner for my young family, and if I don’t work, I don’t get paid!
You know the thought of that makes my stomach hurt :-) Looking forward to hearing from anyone in a similar situation to me.
E-mail Mark: mt006e9665[at]blueyonder.co.uk