Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: Okay, what happened??? What could have done this to me ?

Thanks so much for your post above. Here at Heather's site, I see almost what I could call a "state religion" that focuses so much on food, and while this is valid, it can be distorted.

I had a good month of July with weeks of "torpedo" stools, and I ate the same dull stuff every day. Then suddenly for no reason I started having gas one day really bad (uh oh) and then it lead to "D". I have no idea why. I took Immodium and it shut down, so now I am in the quiet zone, and hope the pendulum of the IBS-A is now going to swing back the other way (away from "D").

But I get really annoyed at people here (and I love them all but I still get annoyed) desperately trying to find THAT ONE TRUE TRIGGER (like the Holy Grail) that started their "D", and if they can just find it, they will never again have a "D" attack.

I love you all and want the same thing, but I just do not think life with IBS is that easy. We do not evevn know what causes it, and I simply do not believe it is controlled 100% purely by what you eat. The latest theories say it is a mind-gut communication dysfunction. So eat your little hearts out, all the most pure food in Eden, but I think there is still missing knowledge (maybe we need to follow Eve and seek the answer from the Tree of Knowledge?). I don't think we know enough about IBS to think we can "out eat" it. If you have an attack, it might be something you ate. True enough. But the reason can be totally oblivious to us!

I remember (was it King George the Third?) who had a rare disease that caused madness and his urine to be blue! This is historical fact. Well, at the time, the way to evaluate a person's health in the 18th century was to see how firm their stools were. His stools were firm, so the best physicians of the period were stumped. But they assumed that since King George was Royalty, this explained why his urine was blue. Of course, now medical science has a name for his rare disease and knows all about the cause and why the urine was blue.

Sometimes as far as IBS goes, we are still in the 18th century and our physicians are just as clueless.

Perhaps in IBS this slang expression and rude bumpersticker is LITERALLY TRUE:

"S**T Happens".

Stop always trying to rationalize it or explain it. At times we can't! It reminds me a little of the New Age people who believe you create all your own reality. So if you have cancer, they make themselves feel secure against ever getting cancer themselves by insisting that YOU did something that gave you cancer, thereby creating a guilty party. You repressed your anger, you didn't have enough love as a child, you intentionally stepped on ants, or something. But the truth is that we still don't know why some folks get cancer. They just do. We also don't know why someone who follows all the rules gets a flare-up. TO me, it is just the way IBS is. I can do everything I can think of to minimize such problems, but they are going to happen, and I would better spend my time just detaching from guilt and emotional upset, drink some hot pepppermint tea, put on a good old fashioned movie I enjoy, cuddle up on the couch and nurture myself until it passes.

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