(okay, this is super duper long and self-absorbed so I'm sorry about that! I just don't know how to explain it other than from my perspective! Hopefully, though, someone finds my experience useful in their own recovery!)
Hey, there.
Having recently come out of a prolonged period of pretty aggressive, bowel-related health anxiety, I thought I’d try to chronicle my experiences. I do this as an exercise in cathartic reflection for myself but also, I hope, in a way that others might find enlightening or useful in some way. I’ll try to keep things as sanitary as possible but it’s worth noting that this post contains reference to poo, throwing up and cancer fears. Which I suppose is to be expected here.
So, for the sake of context: I’m a 33-year-old male from the UK who has experienced a lifetime of anxiety-related problems. I was one of seven children born to an endlessly loving yet extremely anxiety-ridden mother, whose neuroticism was passed down to or otherwise learned by myself and the majority of my siblings.
My particular concerns revolve around throwing up, linked as I think they are to what I used to perceive as terribly scary things: dentist trips, long stints away from home, returning to school - all things which used to induce great panic and thus great puking, not just in me but my brothers and sisters, too. This was, I suppose, reinforcing behaviour. I’ve always had a very pronounced phobia of throwing up, less because of the sensation of doing so but, I suspect, the spectacle of it all. I am a very loud thrower-upper.
Anyway! That’s just background! On to why I’m writing here!
In March of last year, my mum died. I had the misfortune of discovering her in the process of doing so and by that point I couldn’t really do much to help besides call emergency services. It was not a nice thing to go through but I had, I thought, handled it well enough. Of course, this was only quantified by outward stoicism and not really by any sensible measure; lo and behold, it seems grief always finds a way to manifest itself.
In the following June (the 19th, to be exact), I discovered that I couldn’t shit. Well, I could. But it was far from satisfying - and not just because I’m a crap completionist. These would be considered feeble faecal offerings even by a hamster’s estimation, leaving me still feeling as if there was plenty more to unload but being simply unable to do so. Something was blocking it. This was a sure thing because what I produced was thin. One time it even looked like the way ice cream curls when scooped out of the tub. In this case, Haagen Ass.
I had always been a very solid dumper - it wasn’t an aspect of my life that ever really concerned me - but now, nothing was coming.
I gave it a day. I gave it two days. By the third day I was officially wallowing, the initial worry rapidly replaced by abject, existential terror, thanks in no small part to the awful decision I made in Googling the symptoms. And then, worse still, exploring every article I could find related to bowel cancer in the relatively young. Google was only too happy to stoke my fears, plopping websites that validated my concern at the top of each and every search result and I, for whatever reason, couldn’t get enough of them. I read until I felt sick. But, for once, throwing up wasn’t my primary concern.
The rest of June was spent pestering the doctor. I went three times the following week, was prescribed some laxatives but, although they increased the volume of my now liquid output, this did little to solve the problem when I was without them. I still couldn’t shit unassisted by medication. Certainly not properly, anyway.
A week or so after the problem started, I had convinced myself I was losing feeling in my legs. That the tumour I unquestionably had lodged in my guts had grown into contact with my spine in a week. And while this could have been rationalised by the fact I was carrying a metric tonne of crap in my system which was adding pressure to my hips or whatever when sat down, I was having none of it. I had more or less stopped eating out of sheer worry by this point. And coffee, normally a key component of my daily diet, was out of the question. Isn’t it funny the ways we find to make the situation worse?
This persisted through the rest of June and into July, when I finally experienced what a normal person would have seen as a reprieve worthy of long-lasting comfort. Having exhausted my capacity to worry following weeks or non-stop fretting, I did, at last, manage to poo properly. Just once or twice but the output was, for lack of a better word, normal. Full in shape. It was no coincidence that this happened following a period of proper eating and less worry. I was, as you might expect, on top of the world. I had cheated certain death for the six-hundredth time in my life. In those moments of euphoric relief, I could almost consider myself thankful of my crippling anxiety disorder - without it, such highs would not be possible. Of course, gratitude was fleeting when the problems inevitably began again.
Narrow, difficult stools. Worse still, the very occasional onset of explosive diarrhoea, seemingly with no real consistent cause. I was more worried than ever before - so much so that I began to write memoirs intended to document the two things I did in my life. I couldn’t get out of bed some days. I watched the making of Titanic like three times in a day and I still don’t know what unholy misery could cause a person to do such a thing.
A brief detour as I talk about my mum for a bit. I’d hope it goes without saying that I loved her immensely, but such sentiment shouldn’t preclude one from speaking honestly about a person. She was a worrier. Someone whose life was ruled by anxiety, rendering her a recluse unable to ever go out and socialise or even leave the house outside the comfort of her car. Someone who overflowed with love but who could never muster the courage to take a risk or challenge her fears. I always feel bad for reflecting on her in this way but it is certain I looked on her lifestyle as one to avoid. Thus, I would always try to confront my fears; I can’t really recall many agreed appointments or social situations I avoided for fear of fear. I say this not to try to big myself up or anything - I am an incredibly weak person in all sorts of ways - but simply to try to explain my own situation in relation to hers.
My mum, on the other hand, was unable to do this. She had perfected the art of exceptionalism, believing herself to not need to challenge her demons because she was “happy” being a hermit. She didn’t need to pursue anti-depressants because they “probably wouldn’t work” for her. She is exceptional too, I suppose, in that she’s the only person I’ve ever heard of who died of a broken leg.
Her inward nature and lack of exercise (as well as vitamin D and varied diet) had caused severe osteoporosis, leading to a fall and the breaking of her tibia. This lead to her remaining bed-ridden for the final few months of her life, her refusal to properly engage with rehabilitation or medication eventually culminating in a blood clot that traveled to her lungs, killing her. It was as needless as it was sudden. Without the will to persist, each new low became my mum’s new standard.
I entirely appreciate that it sounds as if I speak bitterly of my mum’s death. And in a sense, I am bitter about it. I am bitter about the ease with which anxiety can come to define our lives. How it can brutalise us physically. How I can still be struck by it so emphatically, even after nearly three decades and countless false milestones in my fight against it. In truth, I worry that the struggle with anxiety is less a “fight” and more a lifetime of trying to shield yourself from its blows. Something I dearly wish my mum had been more equipped to do.
Because it is of course possible to survive anxiety. It’s possible even to thrive. And while it would be generous to consider myself as “thriving” I am now, a year later, doing better than I have perhaps ever been doing. Because, upon yet more reflection of my life prospects in relation to my mum’s, I managed to peel myself out of bed enough to start attending therapy. I stopped hiding from what I should have committed to years ago. I stopped thinking I was somehow an exception to its benefits. And it was the best decision I have ever made.
Progress wasn’t immediate - I was apparently too riddled with neuroses for the standard mental health professional and was quickly passed on the CBT clinic - but it was encouraging. Hell, I felt good just making the decision to engage with the care. Like I was, for the first time in months, taking some measure of control over my situation. My therapist, I believe, was some sort of angel. Someone who I could discuss issues with frankly but who would not allow me to slip back into old ways of thinking. Someone who would point me in the direction of solutions and prepare me for the work needed to achieve them, whilst making clear that the work was mine to do. To put it simply, CBT (or cognitive behavioural therapy) was a godsend and something for which I thank the NHS every day I get out of bed.
Sertraline played more than a small part in helping me. Like my mum, I was reluctant to start with the medication, believing it at best wouldn’t work or would at worst make me throw up. But its effects (likely on a placebic basis to begin with) were felt immediately. I appreciate that the medication doesn’t work for everyone but again, the taking of some sort of ownership over my situation made me feel good. It paved the way for the chemicals delivered to my brain by the pill to make a more meaningful difference to that erstwhile imbalance. And before I knew it, I was no longer stuck in bed. I was able to concentrate more on work. And, most importantly of all, I was able once again to take dumps of considerable note. It sounds magical, I know. And there’s no real way for me to explain the starkness of the contrast without invoking an unfeasible whimsy. It simply helped me quickly and emphatically.
it had not occurred to me that stress and, perhaps more pointedly, grief could affect ones body so physically. But indeed mine had. In my perhaps irresponsible handling of my own grief over my mum’s death, things had apparently just.. tightened up in me. I never saw a physician who did much more than stick a finger up my arse (an uncomfortable first) and this is merely speculation of my own and my therapist, but it was surmised that things were clenched up there. That when I was given the opportunity for my mind’s tension to ease, a tension I didn’t expect in my body was similarly loosened. I stopped worrying about the nature of my poo and with that absence of fear came a return to normality. A normality sustainable by the grace of CBT, sertraline, and an understanding of my body’s relationship with my mind.
It’s ever so strange the way in which our anxious mind can exist apart from our more rational, sensible mind; a thought I commonly had in rare moments of sobriety was that, were someone to grill me, gun to head, on whether I TRULY believed myself to have cancer, I would answer no. I knew, somewhere in me, that I was fine. And yet I could not stop myself from operating as would a pessimist, hearing and believing only the very worst while dismissing that which made the most sense. I found new and exciting ways to interpret shoots of hope as being spectres of my imminent death, despite the part of my brain that understood reality trying in vain to rationalise them. Perhaps that brief period in July during which I produced big poo was somehow the tumour just being surprisingly considerate for a cancerous growth and making way for its passage? Perhaps the reason things are going on so long is because it would take eighteen months like it did for that YouTube guy to develop more scary symptoms? But now, nearly eighteen months since the problems began, I don’t need a gun to my head to accept I’m not dying of cancer.
A side effect of this episode is that my fears are preoccupied a lot more with bathroom-related things than with throwing up as of writing this. I suppose that’s just the adaptive quality of anxiety, finding a new angle of attack. I certainly haven’t beaten it but, thanks to medication and my experience with therapy, I know how to deal with it a lot more effectively than before. My only regret is that I didn’t take the plunge sooner, just so I could have demonstrated to my mum that seeking help isn’t quite as scary as she thought. In truth, as we -both- thought.
At the very least, perhaps some therapy-shy reader might find some encouragement to pursue the same assistance that has helped me so utterly.
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