DISCLAIMER: this is a very graphic post and there is lots of swearing. Look away now if squeamish or don't like swear words…
. . . I have wanted to write this particular blog for years now but never had the courage to do so. I am normally a very open person (read: over sharer!) but this particular topic has held me to secrecy through shame and embarrassment. You may have seen on the news some months ago, of a person getting around Melbourne pooping in someone’s carport, nicknamed the Poo Jogger. Well I have a confession to make. I am a poo jogger. Not THE Poo Jogger of course, but alas the name still fits. For those of you reading this that I know in real life, if the next time we meet in person I don’t make eye contact, this is why. It’s not you, it’s me. For some reason, poop and bowels and basically anything in that region is still considered to be taboo. It shouldn’t be, but unfortunately it is and I am suitably embarrassed by it. However, maybe by sharing my story it might help others to feel less embarrassed and to even seek help from a professional. It all started a few years ago, very occasionally and random, but sometimes I would be running and feel the urge to go #2. Once or twice, I would’ve been far away from a toilet and faced with the dilemma of what to do. Do I get someone to come and pick me up? Or do I stop running and walk home instead? I didn’t really think much of it, until the time I realised that it wasn’t waiting for anyone and I needed to go NOW. I ducked off into a nature reserve and crawled under a massive bush, praying that no one could see me and no one would walk past. I was deeply ashamed and mortified and fled the scene like a criminal. Except this wasn’t the only time it happened, and the frequencies increased. I started changing my routes so that I was passing more frequent toilets, and I spoke to my dietician at the time about making changes to my diet. Now the term ‘runners trots’ is not a new term, and is discussed on a regular basis on different forums and chat groups. People swear by coffee before a run, others swear by no coffee. Eat carbs, don’t eat carbs. Run in the morning, only run at night. Wake up early and poop before you run. Everyone has an opinion and a solution. But what happens when none of that works. What happens when you wake up 30 minutes earlier just to let your stomach wake up first so you can go to the toilet before you run, but then you still have to go during the run as well? What about when you lose the ability to HOLD it as you do the desperate waddle to the closest public toilets? Now my bowel is an arsehole and when we’re about 400m from a toilet it seems to get excited and think “now? We let go now?? What about now?” No, not now! We are not sitting with pants down on a toilet yet, don’t you dare fucking come out now!! So many times, I will be running and have to pause my watch multiple times to let the cramping pass as I try desperately to maintain control over my bowel that is doing its darn hardest to vacate. A few times (ok many times, more than I care to admit) I have sadly lost that battle. And then it becomes a walk of shame to the toilet to clean myself up and then psych myself up to get back out there and finish the run. I could no longer run in larger groups or on routes with no toilets, as what happens if this occurred when out with others? How could I poop in a bush when I had company? Or worse, if I made a mess of myself, what would others think? I started to reduce the number of people that I felt comfortable running with, and started running at stupid o’clock where no one can see me duck off into the bushes if I need to. About 13 months after my hysterectomy, I started shitting blood. A lot of it. Unless you’ve had the joys of looking into a toilet bowl and witnessing what looks like a murder scene and realising that the massacre has occurred from within you, I can’t begin to describe how truly terrifying it is. I remember training for the 50km at GC50 and stopping multiple times in a long run, pooping more and more blood as I went, wondering if I was actually going to make it back to my car or be found dead in a toilet block from loss of blood? Something wasn’t right and so I had a colonoscopy in December 2018 where they removed multiple polyps and identified some internal haemorrhoids that could be the potential cause of the blood. Once the polyps were out, the blood stopped yay, and my runs became a little less problematic. I still designed my routes around public toilets but the urgency wasn’t there anymore and so things were fine. Fast forward to the end of 2019 and my body was in a bad way for multiple reasons. My endo was flaring back up, ovarian cysts were multiplying at an alarming frequency, and my bowel habits were changing. I started needing to take medication just in order to poop, which then became a vicious cycle as the pain got worse, the medication increased, the pooping got worse, so the poop medication increased. I was in so much pain I wouldn’t walk properly let alone try and run. I was working with a dietician to try and eliminate foods that were making it worse and at one stage was down to only 20 safe things I could eat. By the time I had my surgery in March 2020, my body had stopped absorbing anything and I was alternating between pooping black and bright green and my skin had turned yellow. I was very sick. After I recovered from that surgery, I felt amazing! I was pain free for the first time in ages, I wasn’t struggling to poop, the urge to go multiple times on a run disappeared and I wasn’t shitting myself without warning, and it was back to a normal colour and frequency. Life was good. But in about May, the blood came back. And so did the episodes of frequent pooping and sometimes not being able to hold it. I tried ignoring it at first, knowing what the first colonoscopy had identified, but it all got worse and worse. An hour run would sometimes take almost 2 hours with all the toilet stops and pauses to let the cramps pass. I reluctantly had another colonoscopy in June, and more polyps were removed and the internal haemorrhoids had increased. My surgeon also referred me to a Colorectal Surgeon for some functional testing to try and identify the cause of the “occasional faecal incontinence”. Imagine being 39 and reading that on your referral letter - isn’t it only old people that have incontinence? What the fuck is wrong with me??? So let me tell you about the fun that is functional testing. There is lots of looking and probing, squeezing and holding, and they even stick a balloon-type contraption up there to measure your responses to it being blown up in increments. The surgeon makes it as comfortable and less-awkward as possible, but it is what it is, a balloon up your butt. What was interesting to him was that it only seemed to occur during road running – on trails I could be out there for 10hrs and not have the urge to go once. But give me a 5k run on road and I will shit 3 times!!! There also did not seem to be any patterns or obvious triggers to the occurrences. The surgeon suspected that I have a partial internal prolapse of the bowel which could be contributing to the incontinence episodes as it could be dropping down and pushing on everything else, but the only way to accurately diagnose that is through a Defaecogram/Proctogram. Which is a procedure that takes an x-ray as you poop. Yes, you read that right. You do it at hospital and have to poop while a machine (and maybe a person watching the screen, I don’t know??) takes imagines of you through the whole bowel motion. Kill me now! Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the solution needed for the procedure is currently out of stock across the country so that is on hold. He also referred me to a pelvic physio to see if she could provide any guidance or assistance – side note, of all the fucked up things in my body, my pelvic floor is not one of them and is working like a champ! Well actually, it is working a little too much and doesn’t know how to relax fully, but that’s not impacting my bowels. Great, so we have some things to work on and further tests to do, I can handle this right? Well what do you know, my friend the blood from my butt comes back. Only this time, it is completely different and more terrifying than before. Some days I fart blood. Other days, there is no faecal matter, it is pure blood and tissue. Sometimes bright red and everywhere in the toilet bowl like a B-Grade slasher flick, sometimes darker and chunky like my insides are falling out. My exhaustion levels suddenly hit an all time low. The actual frequency and appearance of my poop changed and became much thinner and harder to push out (not to be confused with constipation, different sensation). My bowels and insides would sometimes ache a lot, and the pain after going to the toilet or having sex was increasing. Of course, I googled. And promptly scared the fuck out of myself. Yes, haemorrhoids bleed and they can bleed quite a lot. Yet the amount of people with bowel/colon/rectal cancer that were originally told (and sometimes multiple times, sometimes too many times until it was too late) that it was just haemorrhoids and not to worry. Now as I said, I am an over sharer and my few running buddies understand this. I took a photo one morning and showed one of them and she fucking freaked out as well! As gross as it was, I actually felt some relief. I finally felt vindicated and validated, like it wasn’t all just in my mind, and no this kind of thing ISN’T normal. So I called the surgeon in tears, not knowing what I should be doing. So, in 2 weeks I will be having another procedure to band the internal haemorrhoids and investigate if there is anything else there. My surgeon is a Colorectal Specialist that specialises in all types of cancers in that region, so I am really hoping that a) he finds nothing and b) that will then ease my stress and anxiety a bit. Because on top of everything else going on in my body and my life, stress and anxiety make all the symptoms worse. Of course they fucking do *insert eye roll*. Oh and just to make it all the more interesting, lets see how all this plays out with the new medically induced menopause ride I’m on… Now whilst I would never want cancer of any sort, as this blog has been rolling around in my brain for awhile now the thought that kept popping in was that at least if it was cancer there would be some importance to it, less embarrassing and more of a legitimate answer or need for awareness if that makes sense. Because if it’s not the Big C, then I’m just a girl that sometimes shits herself when she runs and poops blood right? How mortifying. The term haemorrhoids has also always embarrassed me and I don’t really know why. Probably like anything else in that region, they’re not talked about openly I guess. My limited understanding is they can be internal, external or both. External is easier to treat with both creams and banding treatments as they are visible. Internal is more difficult as they cannot be easily seen and treatments are more invasive. Which is another reason why I have tried to put things off, because to be honest I’m getting really pretty sick and tired of there always being something wrong with me, always one drama or another. If it’s not my useless ovaries, it’s my butt. If it’s not my butt, it’s my boobs. If it’s not my boobs, lets throw in digestive concerns or maybe we can add back in the migraine issues? Take your pick people, there’s plenty to choose from! GAH! But I digress. I could have held off posting this blog until after my procedure, which may have been a nicer way to wrap it all up. But I have had a few close friends confide in me about their experiences and I thought fuck it, we can’t be the only accidental poo joggers out there dammit and why should everyone have to suffer in silence because society has decided that butts are bad and we can’t talk about poo! I say this statement bravely behind the safety of my computer screen, but again I assure you I am still mortified and embarrassed, and so please don’t try to make eye contact with me for awhile while I process the fact I have yet again bared myself open on social media. If you keep inviting me on group runs and wonder why I keep declining, this is why – my poor little soul just can’t handle anything else right now. I’m a sucker for punishment perhaps, but I do truly believe in being real about everything. I have tried to hide these issues and pretend that they didn’t exist for too long, and have suffered in silence along the way. I don’t have the answers yet, and there’s a chance I never will, but if along the way someone reads this and can identify with just a small part of it and suddenly feels just a little bit better about themselves and no longer have to suffer in silence, then great. Just know:
Meanwhile if you drive past me at 4.30am walking out of the bush reserve next to the highway, there’s nothing to see here so just keep on driving mkay….
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AuthorHi, I'm Rhiannon and welcome to my blog. I'm not an elite athlete and I may never win any races, but I'm a "real" runner, juggling work, family and life to achieve my running goals. Archives
October 2020
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