I finished my degree last year and worked for about 9 weeks after but it was hell. I am lucky enough to have parents that are letting me try and get better, but I feel like my symptoms are just not improving.
Every day when I was working I needed to get up extra early to try and empty my bowels before working. I needed several movements before leaving for work, I'd describe it as very soft poo that's hard to pass. It would get to the stage where I need to go but nothing comes out apart from mucus and my bladder is very overactive when my bowel is blocked.
I just don't know what to do. Because I want to work. I am not a lazy person as I really want to be productive and enjoy my life. But I'd rather die than work every day feeling how I felt
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applecat
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So sorry you are feeling so down Applecat. The last sentence of your post upset me -has your anxiety come back with a vengeance? From your post of a couple months ago I thought you may have found a way forward with the help of your friends on this wonderful site. Please, please don't give up and let IBS control your life. If you don't have urgency but have incomplete evacuation you may find CBT helpful, I did. God Bless and hope things improve for you
Hi Linley, thanks for the kind reply. I've got CBT starting on the 24th. I have urgency and incomplete evacuation but I am hoping cbt might help. I hope your life is going well
I understand exactly how you feel. Im doing my university course now and am dreading looking for a job after. every part time job ive had I havnt kept due to the embarrassing nature of IBS. How about an office job? it may be good for you to be open with you condition and let your employers know so that if you do need to go toilet or leave that they may be able to be more lenient with you? vs if its a job where your standing up all day its going to be really difficult. Best of luck xxx
Thank you for the kind reply! My last job was an office job sadly. I'm sorry that you are struggling too. I know how difficult uni is with ibs: shared bathrooms and nights out
You are not alone in this. I quit my last job because the commute on public transport of at least an hour and a half each way was stressful and embarrassing- trains so crowded you couldn't even get through to use the skanky loo!
A previous employer was really good and when I was having a bad day I could just work from home. But my last employer said 'let us know a week in advance on when you'll be working from home.' - if only IBS was that predictable!
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, bring this up early with HR - let them know your situation and if they are a good employer, there should be ways around it to make you feel comfortable in the workplace thus reducing stress and anxiety... I hope.
Hi applecat. I completely understand how you feel, I got my degree two years ago but have come to the conclusion that I don’t actualky want any kind of career with any pressures purely because my body can not cope with it. As soon as I am remotely stressed my ibs flares up and then I get awful anxiety and then the vicious cycle continues. It’s good you have supportive parents, what I would suggest is maybe start with a part time job, learn how to manage your symptoms at work, build up some confidence and then gradually increase time at work. I know how hard it is, I am starting a new job in three weeks and am already worried about when I can eat and if it’s going to upset my stomach. Ibs is so hard to live with, but keep going, things do get better eventually.
Thanks for the reply! Yeah I've been trying out different things to make life more bearable for a while now. But yeah it does sound pretty much just like trying to deal with it !
You are not alone. I am working mobile travelling and somedays I have to leave at 6am so I can empty my bowels I get up at 4am and it’s very tiring. But have you thought about hypnotherapy or something in that Avenue it helped me a lot when I thought i was going to have to give up work!
Me too - I have to get up early to make sure I have emptied my bowels properly before going to work - sometimes 2 hours before I shower then leave etc- what I will say is that the colon cleanse tablets from Holland & Barrett seem to help, find I can feel a bit paranoid sometimes even though I have showered and douched - bloody nightmare - up till 6 months ago I had nothing to worry about,
Hello, I copy and paste this to a lot of people, so forgive the impersonal nature.
After 27 years of suffering with IBS-D I have found that the long term solution that actually works is all about vitamins and fasting and both are equally important. You are effectively the manager of a food processing factory, I know that is obvious, but I have found that IBS is not about medicines, but about changing the way you run the factory.
This is based on some excellent publications, and also just observing how healthy people live. First, go to the doctors and get yourself checked for intestinal infections, and whatever other tests they want to do, you can be a carrier of some bugs and only suffer occasional flare-ups. But, if you are all clear then the first thing to sort out is your vitamins and the timing of your eating (fasting periods). An incident of food poisoning or infection can start you on a cycle that you need to make a really concerted effort to break out of. IBS causes vitamin deficiencies which are very difficult to overcome in most people’s diets, especially because you are probably eating selectively to manage your symptoms. Your vitamin levels affect the health of your guts, and the health of your guts affects your vitamin absorption, so it is a vicious circle that you have to break. Get some really good, expensive, multi-vitamins (ideally constituted for your age) and take them without fail every day before your breakfast. Do not get the ones with high calcium and magnesium initially as certainly in large doses these minerals can mess you up as they consume your stomach acid, and you should get enough of these minerals from your diet. If you are on low FODMAPs, go for all lactose free dairy products to boost your calcium. At the same time, sort out your fasting periods straight away. Your small intestine should be practically sterile, and your stomach acid along with bowel cleaning during fasting (called MMC) will usually do this. You need to fast for this to be effective, and by that I mean, ABSOLUTELY NO eating in between meals, only water, or tea with saccharin. Imagine that you never washed your dinner plates and just kept putting food on them all the time!, they would be filthy. You need to give your small intestine plenty of time free of food for cleaning and maintaining the factory. God didn't design us to have cupboards full of rich foods permanently available day and night. Your stomach will sort itself out when you have got control of your small intestine (although if you've got gastritis you'll need to finish a course of omeprazole first), and then your large intestine will improve later as nutrients are more efficiently absorbed from your small intestine. Eat a good breakfast at say 7am (porridge with 50% lactose free milk) or what suits you and then a good lunch at 12 o'clock - absolutely no food in between. After lunch, no food again for at least 5 hours, and eat well again for your evening meal because it has got to get you through the night. No supper or snacks, no food or milk at all until breakfast the next day. In general, do not eat fried or roasted starches, i.e. crisps, chips, roast veg or fried rice. The high temperature that gives the lovely crispy bits, makes complex polymers that are very difficult to digest, they feed the bacteria and make you ill. Starches should only be boiled, and this is enough. Red meats take a long time to digest, only have them once a day, and just a light salad to go with them, not a load of starchy foods, as they have conflicting digest times. You will feel hunger in the fasting periods, but you must not respond to it - only with water or no-sugar drinks. Importantly, when you are feeling better, do not resort to your old ways, you are still recovering, and you need to make a life-style change to have this level of discipline in your eating and continue with it. Start doing some exercise if you don’t already, as this will really help with your gut motility. Your intestines take time to fully recover, it takes a few weeks at least, and you need to persevere. You then need to maintain a healthy and consistent way of eating and always keep the vitamins topped up all the time to prevent you from relapsing. There is a lot of support for L-glutamine to help with nutrition specifically for your intestinal lining, this means buying 500g of the bodybuilder powder type and having a couple of tea-spoons of this a day, one before breakfast and one just before you go to bed, and you can have this in a light cordial drink. A lot of this was taken from this GENIUS paper below, but it does fit exactly with what I have experienced, and for the first time I really feel in control of something that has been a burden for years, but is not longer. Good luck.
Treatment and Management of SIBO — Taking a Dietary Approach Can Control Intestinal Fermentation and Inflammation
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