Kaylee’s Personal Story: Constipation and IBS
I think I was a sensitive, anxious person from the moment I was born. After my parents took me home, I slept a LOT for about a week straight before finally beginning to take in the world around me. And take it in I did—all of it, all the time, and it was too much. This anxiety would slowly build throughout the course of my childhood and into adulthood as well, and I believe it’s a major cause or instigator of my GI issues.
After being in school for a couple of years I started to experience intense stomach aches followed by diarrhea, often after lunch. I anticipated the stomach aches and feared them, and after witnessing a couple of peers throw up during class, I feared I would be next. Every meal felt like a gamble, and that has been the case for my life so far.
I’m 28 now and have experienced a myriad of mental and physical health issues both acute and chronic. I have chronic constipation, something I’ve also struggled with since a kid, and it’s worsened by a hypertonic pelvic floor. Foods or ingredients like certain FODMAPs and most fried foods trigger diarrhea, and sometimes I can’t place what’s caused it, although increases in stress or anxiety are probably a factor. Between GI problems, painful periods and sex, and the occasional ovarian cyst, my general abdominal area feels more like a weapon being used against me rather than equipment keeping me alive. The reality is something more in the middle.
Right now I try to manage things with over the counter laxatives and stool softeners and eating more fiber, but to be honest, the so-called American diet has created an appetite for me that doesn’t find most vegetables to be very appetizing, so I stick to fruits while also balancing the amount of fructose, a major trigger food for me, I take in. Finding the right doses and schedule for laxatives and similar remedies has proven extremely challenging, too. And though I know I need more exercise, I am resistant to that as well because it’s something I’ve never enjoyed, and depression makes such activities all the more difficult.
So I’m kind of stuck in this limbo between “diagnosis and treatment” and “illness management”. I still have hope that someday I won’t have to think as much about these things, but they are likely to be constant companions for the foreseeable future, so my biggest goal is to try not to see my body as an enemy but as a friend—or at least a comrade-in-arms.
