There is a secret society of people who have dealt with digestive issues. Nobody wants to talk about these things, but if you are currently struggling with one and especially if you are just starting the diagnostic process, I want you to know you are not alone. I debated about writing this anonymously so as to preserve my own dignity, but that seems like defeating the purpose of normalizing these problems. So instead I give this disclaimer– If you’re my mom (who is super classy), don’t read this. It’s about to get real.
First of all, there is nothing like calling a doctor’s office to explain that you need to be seen because you broke your pooper. There are just no good words to describe it on the phone to a receptionist. All of the sudden you find yourself awkwardly saying words that haven’t come out of your mouth since your high school anatomy class. “And then my. . . ummmmmm. . . my stool. . . it’s abnormal. . . . I think my intestines are broken.” So you schedule an appointment and then try to imagine exactly how they are going to get any useful information about this problem you’re having. It’s just an interview, right? They’ll take your word for it and something you say will magically make them understand exactly the problem and they’ll hand you a pill to swallow and then you’ll be fine? Yeah, that’s not how that goes.
You’d back out of the appointment except that when you have a poop problem, it is a daily deal. You never appreciate a good, healthy, normal poop until that is NOT what was happening in your life anymore. You’re sitting there just hoping to see something resembling the poops of ye olden days, but no. You’re now in some kind of New Poopland where you need to be within a five minute sprint from a toilet at all times with no guarantee about what will happen when you get there. Mostly it’s some kind of poop soup involving what appears to be pieces of intestines that are trying to make a break for it. And you can hardly blame them. Right now you’d kind of like to abandon this sinking ship, too.
So you go to that first doctor appointment where you answer all the questions and try really hard to correctly use the term “bowel movement” without laughing and that isn’t quite enough information so they need to run some tests. SOME POOP TESTS. So your doctor hands you a brown paper bag and inside it is a cup for you to poop in. This is a real thing. And there is some kind of spoon situation where you put some of the poop into another container. . . honestly, I’ve blocked a lot of this out of my memory and for good reason. But then you have to take your bag of poop to a hospital where they will then run the tests and you’re crossing your fingers that what you have is some horrific food poisoning situation that can be treated and not a mystery ailment that will require MORE POOP TESTS.
You sit down at the hospital desk to register, all the while knowing you have a bag of your own feces at your feet. They’re asking about your home address and emergency contacts and all you can think is “THERE IS A BAG OF POOP HERE.” At some point the lady will ask about the bag of poop and you will present it to her with the shame of someone returning a candy bar they stole, but she will make you feel better by telling you a story of how she finished filling out the paperwork with someone else once and when she asked for their poop, they simply slid the McDonald’s cup across the table that they had set down there at the beginning of the interview. You will both laugh and you will feel somewhat better that at least you did not bring your poop in a McDonald’s cup.
But then the tests will not give you the answers you were hoping for and you’ll end up in the office of a doctor who cannot make eye-contact with you (and you will feel SO THANKFUL FOR THAT) while he talks about your digestive system problems and repeatedly refers to “your bottom” which makes you feel like you’re five years-old, but that’s kind of a relief in this context. Five year-olds don’t feel shameful about their “bottoms” and their poop related problems. He’ll push on your stomach a little and ask you more questions and tell you you need some testing that involves a camera (technical name = flexible sigmoidoscopy. my nontechnical name = half a colonoscopy). You nod your head because what else can you do, but inside you are screaming about the indignity and there must be another way. Then he mentions that normally they would put you under some sedation and do a full colonoscopy, but because you are pregnant (did I mention you are a couple months pregnant through all of this?), you might want to try going without the sedative. So now you are facing the reality of having a camera put up “your bottom” while you are wide awake and conscious. This is now a thing that is going to happen to you.
They inform you that if they’re going to get any kind of clear results, you must have clear intestines for them to look at. How does a person get clear intestines, you ask? Drink a lot of water? Take one of those “colon cleanse” supplements you hear advertised. Nope. You drink a horrible, gag inducing substance and then spend the next few hours pooping out what seems to be everything you’ve ever eaten since you were about fifteen. If you were ever worried about things like gum staying in your system for years, you are no longer concerned about that in the least. The last step in this process is something that I think can only rationally be called a butt douche. I will leave it at that. Except that there’s this weird feeling that you can’t see if you got everything clean, but you know it will soon be revealed how well you did to a team of medical professionals. This feels like having your boss over for dinner and cleaning the house blindfolded. No pressure or anything.
For 24 HOURS before your appointment you can’t eat anything (did I mention you are pregnant?). Then you go into your appointment and realize that generally speaking, young pregnant women are not having this procedure done. You are in a waiting room of primarily older men in suits. And your husband is eating fries and a Big Mac until a nurse politely informs him that EVERYONE IN THIS WAITING ROOM IS STARVING so could you please eat that somewhere else? When he gets back from eating you have been taken back to a room to be prepped. Except it’s not really a room, it’s just a curtained off area with a rolling bed. The room is full of curtained off areas with mostly business men in rolling beds either awaiting this procedure or recovering from it.
Now comes the moment. You are wheeled back to the room where everyone is going to see what the inside of your body looks like. There are several things you didn’t realize before this moment. You didn’t realize the screen where they look at your insides would be positioned directly in front of you so that you too are seeing the journey this camera is about to take. You didn’t realize the image would be GIANT, so the doctor can really get a good look. You also didn’t realize there would be several people in the room monitoring you and the process. You especially didn’t realize that they would turn the camera on BEFORE inserting it into your body and that the first image you would ALL see on that screen would be your actual butt. YOUR BUTT IS NOW PROJECTED ON A SCREEN THAT THREE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT AND ANALYZING. This is not some medical looking shot of the inside of your intestines, but a view of your hind quarters that you have never quite seen before and hoped you’d make it to your grave without having to view. You did not realize that when that moment came, you would make an audible surprise noise. Not quite a scream, not quite a yelp, not quite a groan, but some mixture of the three. The medical people are acting like this is no big deal while you’re groping for something–ANYTHING– to say that would make this moment less weird. You mumble things like, “Oh wow. Okay. Hey there.”
So now the camera is doing its camera thing (after the horrifying experience of watching it get to where it needed to go. . . I can’t even. . . ) and something is detected that needs to be examined further. So a tiny arm extends in front of the camera with pinchers on it to take a sample. And you feel a pinch while also seeing a pinch, but the pinch is probably made by pinchers smaller than your pinky nail, but because it is projected on a giant screen you are watching some sort of alligator situation take a chunk out of your body.
Once the worst is over, they roll you back to your room (i.e. curtain area) where you realize you are the only person in the recovery area who was fully awake for this procedure. And now comes the fun part. Nurses are attending to the men in the curtain areas around you and saying so sweetly and gently, “Sir, I’m going to need you to pass a little gas for me. Can you do that, Sir? Just need to take care of that and then you can go home.” on account of the extra air they had to put in all of us. And you hear these respectable gentlemen sleepily say, “mmmmhmmmmmm” and then you hear this air escaping them. And you look at your husband and you try SO HARD not to laugh because surely there’s nothing funny about men waking up from sedation and being told to fart. But obviously you can’t NOT laugh at that and then the nurse walks in and you feel all ashamed for laughing, except it’s obvious that the nurse finds this funny too so you feel slightly less horrible.
Now you go home and eat your own well deserved Big Mac and wait for results. Results will involve a diagnosis that means you will be taking medication indefinitely (although for me, things cleared up about six weeks post pregnancy) and when they tell you that you are so relieved until you realize they mean SUPPOSITORIES. I am not going to attempt to describe to you the gymnastics it takes to be 40 weeks pregnant and giving yourself a suppository, I will only tell you that you do what you have to do and I have done it.
I am thankful that this issue did not continue to be a problem for me and that helpful medicine exists. I am thankful for good medical care and tests that can give answers. I am thankful for awkward doctors who are not suave and have terrible bedside manner so you don’t feel compelled to focus on the social graces while someone is talking about “your bottom.” If you are struggling with intestinal problems, try to remind yourself that this doesn’t have to be shameful. But if you can look at it with the right perspective, it might be funny.
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