Have you ever noticed, if you have looked at internal imagery of our innards, how much our intestines and colon resemble the brain? Just like the brain they appear to be meandering tubes packed tightly together and, like the brain, they appear to have a mind of their own.
I watched a recent documentary on the digestive system by Doctor Michael Mosley. In it he said that the gut has as many neurons in it as a cat has in its entire brain. That interesting titbit packed a wallop for me as a piece of information and, I would say, explains a lot about Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The brain and the gut communicate. If we are stressed, even subconsciously, the gut conspires to give us a bowel spasm to force the brain to relax. It's revenge by the gut on the overthinking, over worrying brain. It doesn't work of course, but just gives us one more thing to worry about.
From the time I was born my gut has been my enemy. Before I was six months old I had a bout of gastroenteritis that put me in hospital. At another time a doctor prescribed an antibiotic for me that literally stripped my bowel lining. It wasn't meant to, it just did. It was called Chloromycetin and was given to me orally. It is now only used topically for eye infections and can cause aplastic anemia taken internally. Later in my life a doctor told me that I was lucky not to have developed leukemia because of it. I sometimes wonder if a lot of my digestive ailments arose from this but I doubt it.
When I complain about my bowel I will stress that I have not had anything life threatening from that area, or any other part, of my anatomy but mainly debilitating ailments. All that is except for an appendix that had started leaking by the time it was removed and left me ill for three months afterwards.
I think that every single one of us, with the exception of a few lucky ones, have an ailment that is the result of stress, whether conscious or subliminal. These manifest as migraines, a bad back and/or neck, irritable bowel syndrome and such.
From the age of five I suffered from stomach upsets. These would involve me waking from sleep every few months very nauseous and then heaving my guts out before making it to the toilet. In fact, I didn't even make it out of bed and learned to sleep with a bowl beside my bed. My parents couldn't work out what was causing me to be sick. A number of theories came up but none proved to be the answer until, after many doctors, I visited a naturopath at the age of twenty one. The naturopath advised me to steer clear of milk, cream and ice cream. All through the years I had drunk milk but it seems my body tolerated it only so long before I had one of my nauseous episodes. Now that I'm older, even one glass of milk would make me ill immediately.
For years my mother thought I was allergic to pork as, when we had dinner with friends of her and father's, we were often served pork with gravy and vegetables, but I'd eaten pork without trouble before. Eventually we realized that the lady of the house would stir cream into her gravy, not something ever done in our house. Her delicious meals would bring on violent nausea attacks. Now if cream is brought to the boil I can actually tolerate small quantities of it. I am also fine with cheeses thank heavens. It must be the enzyme process that matures cheese and the breaking down of molecules in cream by boiling it that make them digestible.
There was one thing that I loved as a child that should have given us the first inkling that I was lactose intolerant and that was an ice cream soda. When I was young ice cream didn't make me throw up but one ice cream soda, now called a spider, did and I knew that I'd be sick in the middle of the night but would have one anyway. Eventually I decided it wasn't worth the after effect and stopped having them.
By the time I was twenty one and went to my boyfriend's twenty first birthday party, I knew what to avoid. Unfortunately people slip ingredients into recipes you think you are familiar with and so think will do no harm. Have you ever noticed what happens to orange juice and cream together? It curdles. At the party I was given a glass of champagne and orange juice. I don't care for orange juice but drank it. We then sat down to a formal dinner that started with prawns in a cocktail sauce sitting in half an avocado. My mother didn't put cream in a cocktail sauce but this family did and I didn't know it.
I didn't make it to the main course but spent the next six hours on their lower level bathroom floor heaving even when there was nothing left to heave. Happily there was an upstairs bathroom for non afflicted guests. Boyfriend's father spent the entire time sitting beside my prostrate self, who was leaning on the toilet, trying to sooth me convinced I had drunk too much. I'd had one glass of the champagne orange mixture. Nothing I said between heaves would convince him otherwise. At midnight they hauled me upstairs to a bedroom where I dry heaved once more before falling asleep.
It was a night to remember and made boyfriend feel so much better as he had spent the night of our first date throwing up garlic snails and feeling mortified. I was very understanding, which he couldn't believe as he thought he had ruined his chances with me. He said that any other girls he knew wouldn't have had a bar of him afterwards if they'd been with him. Oddly enough he was the brother of a girl that I'd been to school with but I didn't meet him through her but four years later when he and I did a computer course. His sister was one of the nice girls in my class but most of them were prize bitches. He lived in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney where most of them came from and so I'm not surprised he had this opinion of them. I didn't make a single friend at that school. To this day, however, I miss my old boyfriend and wonder what has become of him as, while I went on to marry someone else, I remain very fond of his memory. Our stomachs would certainly have been in sync.
Many years later, in my thirties, I began to suffer from bad lower abdomen aches that could render me useless for days. It was considered to be IBS but persisted until I was forty one and became nauseous for three months and then the pain grew too much to ignore. One doctor felt my side and said the swelling was a muscle and sent me home. I hadn't been able to get into my usual doctor but, by afternoon, my partner rushed me there and she took one look at me and put me in hospital. The next morning my appendix was removed. The oddest thing about this was that my father had appendicitis at the age of forty one as well. I told my surgeon that other doctors had told me that appendicitis could not be chronic and rumble for years. He laughed and said that of course it could. He had tried to remove it by laparoscopy but it had swollen to two and a half times its usual size and he had to cut me open.
He released me from hospital a week after the operation even while I felt terrible and couldn't keep food down. A locum I called to the house the next day diagnosed an abscess and put me on antibiotics. A week later I went back to the surgeon and, with puss still oozing from my side, he apologized. It's very hard to stand up for yourself and your rights when you are very ill. All hospitals should have patient liaison staff. It took me three months to recover from the poison in my system.
When I reached my fifties I began driving a cab and this is when the fun began. Having a case of IBS with associated diarrhea and sometimes needing four to five serious toilet stops made for some nail biting trips. After these I would feel punched in the belly. I give myself credit, I managed to keep on working in spite of this. I put off taking a probiotic for years thinking it wouldn't help but was proved wrong. After they began to do their magic I could occasionally have what I called purges, that is four to five toilet stops in a day but I didn't always have to run to the bathroom. In fact, when I finished working eighteen months ago I felt that part of my anatomy had calmed down. Foolishly two months ago I stopped taking the probiotics and the IBS has suddenly started again. Not so much the rush to the bathroom but bowel spasms and pain after going. I had a colonoscopy eighteen months ago and again six months ago and, typical of IBS, nothing shows as wrong.
I honestly think that the human body is the most remarkable thing. It is an incredible symphony of functions that mostly run smoothly without any interference from us. That we have to put up with pain and discomfort when things are out of whack is the price we pay for being biological entities. I have essential tremor in my hands, nothing serious but a nuisance. I have reasonably bad eye floaters but my eyes are in good shape so the floaters are only a nuisance. I have spectacular bunions that I refuse to have fixed as they don't hurt and they're so misshapen that each big toe will have to be fused to the foot and I'm not crazy about the idea. The one thing that has bugged me all my life, however, is my gut. It can take the joy out of a day and I know how many people out there have the same problem. I'm not whinging on my own account, I'm just saying that I'm one more person out there with IBS and some other irritating conditions.
Thank God that in my sixty eight years these things are the worst that has happened to me. Oh, I've had some psychological problems but most of us do. I'm lucky to have all my limbs, my senses and my faculties but when people say that something is a pain in the butt, I know exactly why that expression came about.
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