My first book on Crohn’s Disease will
be published in a mere matter of weeks on the 21st May! I’m very excited
to share it with you. Here I have gifted you with an extract from it (completely
GRATIS!!!!) I know, I’m too kind, I’m just a giver. Hope you enjoy!
‘It’s widely
known that very few people are 100 per cent comfortable in discussing their
bowel movements, and until I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, I would
certainly not have considered myself amongst them. It just wasn’t really the
‘done thing’ in my household. I’m not sure if this mild prudishness goes back
generations or was just more of a trait within my own immediate family, but
it’s certainly something I became more acutely aware of as my problems in that
department began to escalate. I realised I felt vaguely uncomfortable and
borderline ashamed about discussing anything untoward that may have been
happening below the love handles.
I don’t, in
any way, blame my parents for this. I don’t blame anyone, for that matter. It
may have absolutely nothing to do with my upbringing, but there was obviously
some reason I felt so unpleasant about discussing my own rear end. It’s just
one of those things I can’t quite place. This ‘thing’ however, made it
decidedly more difficult for me to be as honest as I could with doctors and
nurses when they were struggling to diagnose my illness. I felt it was easier
to nod in agreement with their suggestions than to express the full extent of
the aforementioned ‘uproar’ I was experiencing down there. I wanted to save
myself the red-faced humiliation, and no matter how much I was told they’d
‘heard it all before’ I couldn’t escape the fact that I was actually being
forced to talk about POO. MY poo for that matter.
This fool
couldn’t handle her own stool.
This missus
couldn’t discuss her faeces.
This burd
couldn’t debate her own tur…you get the general idea.
In Crohn’s
Disease a patient’s toilet activities are very important indeed. What ends up
in the porcelain can be an incredibly vital clue for doctors in establishing
the extent of the disease and its effects on the body. Medical professionals
can discover so much from just a small, unassuming stool sample. Not only that,
but they can also garner a huge amount of information from simple questioning.
All of which means as a patient you really have to get to grips with ‘talking
shit’. Normally an absolute BLESSING for me. They will need to know specifics.
What consistency is it? Is there blood in it? How much is there, and how often
are you going? I’m never particularly comfortable with this kind of bizarre
quizzing, but I’m slowly trying to learn to get descriptive about it. In fact I
now find that more people around me feel they can openly discuss their own
bowel movements, whether I want to hear about it or not. As though I’ve
unwittingly become some strange form of poo guru. A Poo-ru, if you will. People
have started asking me what it means when this, that or the next thing happens
in their bathroom. I absolutely do not profess to be any kind of expert on
matters of the rear, however I do have extensive knowledge of various unsavoury
scenarios that people tend to think gives me insight others perhaps don’t
possess.
Many new
(and old) patients also find this type of ‘in-depth’ colon-versation difficult
to take to at first. Most of these patients, thankfully, find that they
eventually become immune to the discussions with medical professionals that
take place around that area. They come to realise, as I’ve had to, that it’s
essential, unfortunately, in helping the doctors do their job to the best of
their abilities. At the end of the day, it’s our health on the line; therefore
we should do everything in our power to help ourselves get better. I often find
myself getting incredibly frustrated by the fact that there still seems to be
such a stigma attached to Crohn’s Disease. This stigma spreads itself across
several other bowel-related illnesses for that matter. We, as humans, are all
essentially the same; we all take in food and water in the same way and all
expel it in the same way too. So why should we be embarrassed to discuss these
things openly? That’s not entirely true of course, humans with Crohn’s often
find their bodies (and in particular their bowels) don’t work in quite the same
way as those without, however much we would like them too.
When you
have been established as a Crohn’s patient, you may find a lot of your doctor’s
time can be spent at your rear end. Not a thought I’m sure you, or your doctor,
will particularly relish. Colonoscopies and other similar procedures can be
invasive and often require ‘probing’. You know – that thing that aliens always
do in films when they come down to Earth for a visit. One could certainly say
it is an alien concept, for a stranger to drug you then shove a camera up your
back passage without so much as a mojito for your trouble. Then, as if that
weren’t enough, for you all to sit around and watch the show on a screen!
WITHOUT any popcorn. It’s an absolute scandal! I exaggerate, obviously; you do
get a mojito (if you go private).’
For more of this nonsense you can
purchase ‘Go Your Crohn Way’ when it is available to buy from 21st
May (and it can currently be pre-ordered from Amazon). You can sign up to email
alerts from my publisher here:
