Bit of backstory (1) - Something's brewing down below

Its been a pleasant but uneventful day so I thought now would be a good day to start with a bit of back story. You should feel honored, dear reader as this is the kind of thing that I only let people in on when I'm comfortable with them.


We all have a tendency towards certain kinds of illnesses. Some people get headaches, some get back ache. Mine was bad guts. I was a colicky baby and right through childhood it always seemed that I'd have moments of sickness. No family holiday was complete without me being sick at some point. Throughout my early adult life I never had much of an appetite. I just didn't have that love of food that most people seemed to have. I also seemed to have more than my share of times when - as a student for example - I would get sick from what I'd been drinking well before I got drunk. I thought this was merely due to having a slightly weedy constitution. It seemed to improve by moving from beer to spirits, so I didn't worry too much.

The first time I thought something might be wrong was when I tried to get fit. Due to my small appetite I never had a problem with my weight. So, while I had dabbled with the gym I never really saw the point. Then, in 1998 I agreed to go on a skiing holiday. So it was time to build up a bit of muscle. So I enrolled and threw myself in with a vengeance. At first it seemed to be working well. My strength was increasing and I was toning up. Strange thing was my appetite didn't increase to match. When I had a body mass test I had the same fat levels as an endurance athlete. But I didn't have the endurance.

Needless to say, the skiing holiday wasn't great. Falling over so many times wasn't great for someone as skinny as me. Coupled with this, the cold seemed to cut straight through me and I just couldn't get warm. My guts weren't great either, which was particularly bad as I was sharing a room with someone I didn't know too well.

I put this down to just not being much of a skiing type.

Shortly after this some friends came over for my birthday. It was a repeat of some of the drinking experiences I'd had years earlier only more so. I started getting sick quite early on and could barely keep anything down. I put it down to a bad pint and resigned myself to just having a bit of a crap birthday.

I muddled along for a while, but my enthusiasm for food was seriously waning. Some evenings I'd barely manage a bowl of cereal. It was hard to disguise that I was losing weight and people started dropping hints about having to eat more. Some implied that I might have some kind of eating disorder.

In 1999 I moved out of the house I'd been sharing and bought my first house. This was both the best and worst thing I could have done.

I now didn't have to disguise the fact that I needed to go to the toilet a lot. I also didn't have to worry when the one and only bathroom in the house was occupied (there was a particularly embarrassing moment one time where I had to resort to pooing in a plastic carrier bag when someone was showering in the shared house). I didn't have to field questions on what I was eating that evening.

But I also had the opportunity to hide myself away from the world. I could come in from work, eat what I could manage and then huddle in front of the tv. My energy levels were low, but this didn't matter as I had no inclination to go anywhere. Provided I could invent some meals that I'd pretend to have eaten whenever my parents rang I was fine.

But I was denying that I had a problem.

It was a tv program on gut problems that started me thinking. There were people on there with eating disorders and illnesses (one in particular stuck in my head). It was time to admit that I too had a problem. I booked myself in to see my GP.

This was my first introduction to the marvelous world of poo. I was to provide him with three stool samples [1].

I dropped the stool samples off and awaited the results. Three weeks later I rang for the results. Bad news - my stool samples had been misplaced. I went through the process again and awaited the results again...

Worse news. They had detected "occult" blood in the samples. Now this wasn't, as I initially thought, an accusation of carrying out strange black magic rituals involving blood and poo. It meant that there was blood from my gut in my poo.

It was time for me to see a specialist. I should wait for a letter to arrive from the hospital.

If I didn't have diarrhea before, I did now...

[1] The mechanics of providing a stool sample are as follows:

1. Create a "nest" of toilet roll in the bowl.
2. Carry out your bodily functions as normal (being careful not to wee as this will harm the sample).
3. Remove the little blue spade/spoon from the stool sample bottle.
4. Collect a small heap of poo from the nest using the little spade/spoon.
5. Place this in the bottle and secure carefully.