sweetv

Hi. I have been reading alot of the stories about people with constipation issues and I thought that I would write to tell what happened to me and what I have gone through all my life. This is mostly a heads up, a thing to ponder about yourselves, I hope I can help someone with this.
When I was a baby I suffered with constipation, my mother had tried all the wives tale remedies to get me going and the fiber diets but it would only work for awhile. The fiber diets would just make me bloat.
As I grew older I went for longer bouts without going 2-3 days. I would try supositories anything to relieve the pains and bloating. I started going to gastroenterologists, surgeons, any one the general practitioners could think of. Most of them told me it was in my head.
When I was 16 the gastroenterologist told me I had a pocket in my large intestine that caught everything. I found out later this was untrue. Then the x-rays started showing that my large intestine was stretching.I would go for a month at a time without going to the bathroom, I also would not feel the urge to go to the bathroom until the pains and bloating started. Finally, after many ER visits and alot of pain I found a surgeon that I thought at the time knew what was going on. At that time I was 36 years old. I had been to the hospital so many times that year that she said that it was time to remove a portion of my colon. Every one including this surgeon insisted that I had irritable bowel syndrome. Boy where they wrong. When the surgeon finally did the surgery they found that most of the nerves and muscles in my large intestine were dead they also found a polp that was on the verge of becoming cancerous. She said that the x-rays and catscans would have never found this because of the area it was in so I was lucky they operated when they did. They also do not know how far up the damaged nerves go up it could be all the way through my small intestines up to my stomach. I figure this happened because they left it so long. They re-attached my small intestine to a portion of my bowel that was healthy enough to reattach it to.
I am still going through bouts of constipation but most of the time I have diarrhea. I now have to deal with blockages in my small intestines as well so I am still going to the ER which is very frustrating. This is something that I will have to deal with for the rest of my life. The reason that I am telling this story is so that someone else can catch it in time and maybe not have to go through this as bad as I have. What I have is called degenerative bowel disease, or Hirschsprungs disease which is very rare in adults and is generally caught when you are a infant but they are finding in adults more lately. Hope this helps and gets people to ask their family doctors about it. Thank you for listening.