Be warned: this is not a funny post. This post is not going to be laden with badly-drawn MSPaint pictures. For most people it's probably going to be an incredibly dreary informative monologue on shit they really don't care about. I didn't originally write it for this blog, but I'm offering it here as a sort of explanation for why there have been altogether-too-few posts on Caterpillar Equals "n" of late. But maybe you can relate to this a little bit, so if you're at all interested, please read on.
A
little over a year ago, I was the girl who was constantly hungry and famed for
her appetite. I could quite happily consume a whole pizza in one sitting (or
two generous-sized burgers, or a plate full of sandwiches, you get the picture)
and still find room for dessert. Basically, I could eat you under the fucking
table without breaking a sweat. And fortunately for me, I was blessed with a
wicked fast metabolism which meant that no matter what or how much I ate, I
didn’t have to worry about putting on weight.
Today,
I basically have no appetite most of the time (apart from two weirdly specific
times of the day: 11 in the morning and 11 at night). If I didn’t make a
conscious effort to ensure my body kept getting the nutrients it needs, there
would probably be days when I’d be quite happy to survive off of liquids alone.
In fact, I’ve come dangerously close to doing that in the past. And even when I
am hungry, I don’t have to eat much to feel quite full again. A lot of the time
I find a normal person-sized dinner a struggle to get through.
This
isn’t because of body issues or because I’ve stopped liking food (though the
former is certainly a serious societal concern that needs to be addressed). I
fucking love food, and that love will never die. I still spend unhealthy
amounts of my life looking at pictures of food on the Internet and wishing they
were inside me (beautifulfoodisamust.tumblr.com is a favourite of mine). But my
relationship with food is a little more complicated these days. Sometimes the
food I eat isn’t as thrilled about me as I am about it; sometimes when I eat my
body just straight up goes ‘nope, what the fuck, what are you putting in me I
am not okay with this’. And the reason for that is I developed a condition known
as Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but which might more adequately be called
Irritating BullShit. For convenience, we’ll call it IBS from now on.
What is IBS?
IBS
is a bit of a tricky little fucker. When I first starting having IBS episodes,
I thought I’d caught some nasty stomach bug that kept coming back to bite me on
the ass. I felt off-colour, off my food and experienced nausea whenever I moved
around. I went to several different doctors and had a raft of blood tests, pee
tests and poo tests done to try and find out what the shit was going on with my
gut. At one point I was even tested for STDs. As all the test results came back
showing that nothing was wrong, it became clear that what I had was not
salmonella or giardia. After four months of this shit, I came home from
university and visited my GP in Hastings, where I finally got a diagnosis: I
had IBS.
There
are a whole raft of symptoms associated with IBS, and they can vary wildly
between individuals. One friend of mine who also has it finds that he voms
after eating too much of a certain food, but I’ve never experienced that
problem. Another friend who has it finds that she can be fine for weeks on end
but suddenly and for no apparent reason has times where she reacts badly to any
food she eats. By contrast, my IBS is a pretty much constant factor in my life
now.
In
terms of symptoms, I’ve actually come off pretty lightly. When I was first
diagnosed, I did a lot of reading on the subject and found myself confronted
with scary phrases such as ‘explosive diarrhoea’ and horror stories of people
who constantly had the shits or who never knew when they’d next need to rush to
the toilet to have an unexpected vom. To those people, you have my utmost
sympathy. I’ve experienced nothing of the kind: my main symptoms are a bloated
tummy, discomfort in my general tummy/gut area and reduced appetite. However,
when I’m having an episode, my appetite disappears altogether, even the thought
of food can make me nauseous, and the discomfort in my gut can turn into pain. So
far there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to my episodes – they can happen
whenever they feel like it, and I just have to ride them out with all the grace
and dignity of a person whose gut has given up on her.
What the fuck even causes IBS,
then?
In
short: idek man, and neither does anyone else. While we are aware of the range
of symptoms IBS causes, as well as many possible ways to treat or manage those
symptoms, nobody really knows where the fuck IBS came from and what makes it do
the shit it does. Our current understanding of the IBS situation is that it’s
not a solely physical disorder nor a solely mental one – rather, both physical
and mental factors seem to work together to make it all happen.
To
give you a personal example, I’ve found that eating certain types of foods can
set me off, and I try to avoid those types of food where I can. But I’ve also
found that stress can have a huge impact on how happy (or not) my gut is, and
of the two, stress certainly has the biggest impact. The fact that I’ve got
both the mental and physical triggers going on makes it a bit difficult to
pinpoint specific things that aggravate my IBS (i.e. did that BK just set me
off, or am I just a bit stressed out today?). The same is true, I imagine, of
most – if not all – IBS-sufferers. They probably just deal with it better than
I do.
The
good news is that, no matter how shit IBS makes you feel, you’re not ever
actually in any danger of dying from it. IBS causes no permanent damage to your
colon – yay! This means that when you’re on the crapper and feeling like you’re
literally shitting your internal organs out – you’re not! It just feels like
you are! Despite the somewhat sardonic tone of those last two sentences, this
is actually really good news. IBS is not doing serious damage to your
intestines, and that’s something to celebrate fo’ shizzle.
What can you do about IBS?
The
personalized nature of IBS symptoms unfortunately requires a personalized
approach to managing the symptoms, and unfortunately will probably mean a lot
of trial and error until you find treatments that work for you. Here are some
things that I’ve found work for me, maybe some of them will help you as well.
- · One of the first steps I took towards managing IBS was to eliminate foods from my diet that were upsetting my gut. These included caffeine, curried or highly spiced foods, beans, and shitty supermarket bread. This meant saying goodbye to my beloved morning coffees and Thai green curries, but it has been worth it. I’ve also been (mostly) gluten-free for about six months now. I’m not gluten-intolerant as far as I’m aware, but I have noticed that eating a lot of gluten at once has bad consequences for poor gutty. A little bit every now and then is okay.
- · Ginger is renowned for its stomach-settling abilities, and I find that on bad days, having a bit of ginger can help calm my gut down. You can drink ginger beer if you want, just check it’s actually got ginger in it before you buy it – the bubbles may help your tummy too. I tend to just keep some pickled ginger around that I can snack on when I need to.
- · On bad days, I also find it helps to take a medication called Gastrosoothe, which pretty much does what it says on the tin – soothes your gut. You can pop eight pills a day if you need to, and it’s available over-the-counter, though I do recommend getting a prescription as it shaves at least fifteen dollars off the cost.
- · It sounds painfully obvious, but getting up and exercising every day is often a huge help to my gut. There will be times when it does more harm than good, but most of the time being up and moving around is exactly what my gut needs. When I start the morning by getting up and being active, this takes my mind off my IBS, calms my gut down and even wakes my appetite up.
- · Eating lots of fruit and veges also sounds painfully obvious, but I find those are the things that upset me the least in terms of foods. Now I start my day with a healthy fruit and yoghurt smoothie with no added sweeteners, and I try to eat lots of fruit or veges with every meal.
- · A positive attitude helps more than most. Stress is the biggest factor in how bad my IBS gets, and so staying relaxed and positive about life is obviously going to help the most. Waking up with a fearless, ‘I can fucking do this’ attitude is the best thing for it, even on bad days. A lot of the time this is easier said than done, but I’ve done it before so I know I can do it again.
Note
that only one of the things on my list was a medicine. Most of the time you won’t
need meds to cope with your IBS – you can make things easier for yourself just
by looking after your diet and your state of mind.
Where to from here?
I
am by no means an expert at sticking to the list I’ve made above. From the
occasional cheeky pizza to feeling down and defeated to the days when I don’t leap
out of bed in the morning even though I know it’s only going to help me, there
are a lot of slip-ups. If you’re trying to manage your IBS, no doubt you’ll
have slip-ups as well. Not every day is going to be golden, and that’s true
whether or not you’ve got a shitty digestive system. The important thing is
that you don’t beat yourself up about your mistakes, but rather, learn from
them. You felt shitty today so you stayed in bed and watched television instead
of getting up and getting active. That was bad, but one slap on the wrist is
enough of a punishment. Instead of agonizing over how shit today was, say to
yourself, ‘Okay, so I stayed in bed today, but I can learn from this and
remember that next time I feel shit I’m going to get up and do shit anyway.’
I
spent last year being terrified: terrified of having an episode, terrified of
waking up and feeling bad, terrified that if I went out and did stuff with
people I liked I’d have an episode and ruin the whole event for everyone else.
And that fear turned me into a shitty person, and it meant that that was
exactly what happened.
This
year I don’t want to let IBS defeat me or define me. I am not IBS – I am a
relatively normalish people who just happens to have a bit of a shitty body.
But I am going to get up and go out and live my life fearlessly despite the
fact that I have a shitty body, and my shitty body is just going to have to
deal with that. Because the truth is, the worst shit is happening in my head,
not in my gut, and my head is something I do have control over. Beth out.
