Odd symptoms of Poor Gut Health.
I pulled my hip. Badly. I couldn’t put weight on it for months. A hurt hip is a terrible thing.
Over the winter I noticed that I had this odd pain in my tailbone. This pressure was increasing when I sat down. I started sitting on pillow, or shifted off to one side.
I tried all the yoga hip release positions that I could think of and nothing seemed to help for very long.
And then… a flare. I think FLARE deserves some capital letters in this case. I was in the hospital more than once.
My ulcerative colitis is low down in my colon. Ulcerative Proctitis is the name.
Often, I have a feeling of having to poop even when I don’t- when the disease is active. I can often feel spasms and cramps in that area. This is called “tenesmus.”
It’s like a bad guessing game you play with your own butt.
In the past ten years, I had never felt tailbone pain.
I thought it was my hip injury that was just not getting better.
As a person does in this modern age, when you have something new and strange happen in your body, I went down the google rabbit hole.
(Which a person really should not do.)
Soon I was convinced I was dying of cancer.
The persistent rectal bleeding and conversations with ER doctors did not help. Nor did my phone… Once you start searching for things online the algorithm picks it up and shows you more of it. (The good, the bad and the ugly.)
Now I was scrolling Instagram and seeing ads for cancer detection while I waited for my colonoscopy.
After ALL of that and an emergency colonoscopy: I learned that I had extreme inflammation. Although that is a cancer risk, I was not dying at least not anytime soon due to my butt issues.
Pain in your guts can radiate.
My inflammation happens to be near the tailbone. So I had tailbone pain.
I also had pain radiating down my legs like sciatica pain.
I also had pain inbetween my shoulder blades with knots that were getting tighter just like a cork screw was being twisted in.
“Also”… there’s a lot of also had pain here when it comes to gut health.
Your digestive system is the center of your body. If it’s not working well there’s a wide array of things that you might feel that are not diarrhea, upset stomach or constipation like the pepto commercial sings about.
You can also have:
→ Brain fog: like you can’t ever fully wake up
→ Anxiety: feeling on edge and worried
→ Back pain: radiating pain and muscle tension
→ Grumpiness: you are more moody than usual for no particular reason
→ Hanger: you are hungry to the point of anger regularly.
→ Terrible PMS or PMDD
→ Perimenopause/ Menopause hit you like a ton of bricks you feel like an alien in your own body.
Gut health is the first thing that should be addressed with healing or managing a chronic illness.
Most people with “problems” be that mental, physical or emotional are deficient in nutrients.
Why? Poor food choices and/ or poor gut health.
If your gut isn’t working well, it is affecting the rest of your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.
So often we think that if we don’t have diarrhea or an upset stomach that our gut is working well.
It’s not just the obvious symptom, in fact the obvious thing that brought you to see me, is rarely the problem.
How is your gut?