My IBS Healing

“Louise Parker has written an eloquent, engaging, and emotionally resonant first-person account of what it really takes to overcome a life devastated by the painful and incurable disorder, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Fellow sufferers will empathize with and find validation in her struggles, as well as encouragement from her ultimate triumphs. A born writer, her story reads like a novel when in fact it is an intensely personal real-life account. Although she began writing about IBS as a form of therapy for managing her disorder, the end result is a book that is cathartic for anyone who has endured similar health problems. A unique addition to any IBS library, this work would be of particular interest to those who are newly diagnosed, feeling overwhelmed, and in need of a light at the end of the tunnel. ” ~ Heather Van Vorous, Author of IBS The First Year and Eating for IBS, CEO of Heather’s Tummy Care / Heather & Company for IBS, LLC

____________________________________________________________

Have you ever wondered if anyone understands you? If your doctors are more concerned with making dinner plans than helping to ease your symptoms? If you will live the life of a hermit, unable to control yourself in front of others, unable to express yourself to the world…unable to live your dreams?

I am a fellow IBS sufferer like you, and these thoughts and so many others have enveloped my life at times. People—friends, family, coworkers, strangers—do not seem to understand what it is that makes IBS sufferers so rigid and miserable. Doctors cannot empathize with a disorder they cannot see, touch, and oftentimes, diagnose. It is true that it will not kill us and that we are thankful our bodies look normal, but it can suck the quality of life out of our veins and make us question our existence with painstaking awareness of our own awkwardness and idiosyncrasies.

Yet there is so much hope to be had. Research of the brain gut connection has brought us a better understanding and a peek into how this disorder causes havoc in our bodies. Mind Body healing and study is becoming more mainstream in the US and UK, offering us choices and relief besides popping a pill to hide our symptoms. And people, like me, are coming out of their closets to write and make public a very private matter in the hopes that sufferers will find comfort, ideas, and healing, and that doctors will better grasp how to help IBS sufferers who find themselves vulnerable at their doorsteps.

Follow along in My IBS Healing from doctor diagnosis (with actual medical notes), to acupuncture, psychology, and diet overhaul. Read and feel the changes in my body and mind as I morph from a hermit-like, anxious-ridden existence into a person who can express themselves again and see a future.

Book Quotes:

“I stand behind a mostly transparent shower curtain, with the contours of the African continent border shielding my bottom and the outline of Finland and Sweden covering the nape of my breasts. The morning light filters in through a row of plants soaking in the mist on the tops and bottoms of their velvety branches from a windowsill above the crown of my head. I close my eyes and see IBS as one, misshapen cloak smothering everything inside of me, with no clear source point from which to begin fighting back. Its hold on me has spread like spilled oil, a residue sticky with shame, guilt and anger coating everything that I do, all the emotions that I feel, and all of the thoughts that I think. I open my eyes, the stinging stream of water gushing out of the shower at a pressure almost peeling my skin off, and the feeling is of being clean, renewed, and ready to take on a day. But it is mentally tormenting for me to leave such an accommodating room; it’s warmly drenched in sunlight, and I can walk around naked for hours—a rare luxury—without the confines of clothing to bolster me up because a toilet is so near.”

“I can see it now: we walk there, I make it to the bathroom, I make it through dinner, but then she’ll want to get up to go home. I’ll try to lengthen the conversation in some awkward fashion, because I know that as soon as I get up to leave the restaurant, and we are halfway between the restaurant’s bathroom and her bathroom at home, I will become stranded, with this problem, and the embarrassment of running and holding myself will be too great. So I won’t hold myself, because I won’t be able to, and I will sustain conversation like nothing has ever happened, as if I am not in pain, because I’d like her to remember and think of me as something other than suffering from IBS.”

“There are a few moments when I feel like a ball, suspended in mid air, tranquil and steadied in one brief, hypnotically calm moment where there is no pressure, and the weight of the hard metal cannot be felt. Then, whack—the pendulum swings and hits me with another attack, and I am thrown off-kilter once again, aware of all of the leaden weight, aware that at any one moment an attack could come from any side again, and feeling vulnerable. And I’ve been hit so many times, that I don’t even remember the feeling of balance on the path I was originally pursuing, or the one that I am supposed to be on. “

“It’s a corset of societal ideals and norms and ways people should behave that binds around me, lace by lace, until I can breathe in just enough air to keep my body from dying, but not enough to feel alive. We hide everything as people: all of life’s processes and everything that makes us human. There are creams to flatten wrinkles, garters to smooth out fat, deodorants to mask our sweat, breath fresheners to cover-up smells from the digestive process, shampoos, conditioners, hair gels to keep our hair abnormally, weighed down, controlled, and make-up developed to trick the human eye into believing a woman has larger lips, rosier cheeks, and naturally teal eyelids.

To participate in this society, we must conform to its practices, no matter how silly they may seem. But in a society like this, one in which hiding each of the bodily processes until almost in denial that they even exist is standard practice, what happens to people like me who are afflicted with a disorder where bodily processes rule the day?”

“Nighttime can be a blanket of relief for me. Somehow it seems safer, because things can be hidden much more easily in the dark than in the daylight. And I know that it is the time when I can feel normal in being alone in my room because that is what everyone else does at this time of day—shuts the door with no pressure or need to apologize for separating from other people. But sometimes it is so difficult for me to fall asleep. Darkness also brings out anxiety. Laying in it, unable to comprehend the next day, unable to see further than ten feet away, I begin to think through all the different scenarios of Tomorrow, and mostly they turn into insurmountable ones where I am sick, I am found out by other people, I am helpless, or worse yet, all of my problems are waiting for me in the bright light of the coming morning.”

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 6th, 2010 | 1 Comment »