Dangerous Words: It's Just ....

Its Just Period Pain …

Everyone gets it. 

It doesn’t matter that you nearly passed out in your GCSE ICT exam, sitting in that chair hoping that you could just get through to the end. That you could JUST concentrate on the questions, without worrying about the pain that’s coursing through your body in waves.

The cysts that cause you to leave your dream nursing course, leave your dream marketing job, leave pretty much every job you’ve ever held in your heart, and spiral into a darkness.

It doesn’t matter that you end up having surgery, after surgery, after surgery leading to your loss of fertility at 29. No one will listen to your complicated feelings, because you didn’t want children anyway.

Menopause at 29 and yet you hear the quips as you sweat, you’re too young to have hot flushes, and the swollen belly that leads to when are you due, or you eat healthy and yet you are so big …

But its JUST period pain, everyone gets it.

Its Just IBS …

And yet it’s taken away so much.

From social anxieties, to social occasions left ruined by the pain or the fear or the fatigue.

Jobs that I have loved, that commutes have provided unbearable as there is no toilet on a bus, or the fatigue of managing the condition has meant that I have given up a position after I am not able to give it my all. 

Days spent in bed rather than out living my life. 

Shopping trips spent on toilets sweating and crying in pain, rather than having the experience.

Days out to little towns and independent bookshops in the middle of nowhere vetoed due to the lack of public toilet facilities.

Dreaded out of order signs, or long long queues for what you deemed as a safe toilet and sometimes not making it at all. The embarrassment of ruining yet another outfit, because you couldn’t hold it or make it here on time. 

The guilt of picking a chain over an independent, because there will be more than one toilet.

Remember the worst toilet in Glasgow? IBS is having to use it, no matter how bad it looks, because “I’ll just wait until I get home” is a sentiment in a foreign language.

Its slowly destroying your confidence in your body, with all the dietary advice telling you to eat more fibre, white breads the devil, and yet these things are flipped in reverse when low fibre is the only way to make it through a day.

Safe foods become your haven. Rich tea biscuits to nibble on, get you funny looks when everyone else tucks in to an airport full English.

And still, they say it’s JUST Ibs.