Susan Sontag, US activist, critic and intellectual, stricken with cancer, wrote Illness as a Metaphor in which she challenged “victim-blaming in the language that is often used to describe diseases and the people affected by them.” I never read it but not from antipathy, it just never came my way. Besides, the book was published in 1978 and I’d just learned to ski. My mind was on other – no doubt, trivial – things. But I was struck by the title. Metaphors are symbols, vague if useful substitutes, literary conceits; illness seemed too big to be one of those.
This will sound joky and I have form in that direction. But such is not my intent. Here’s a post called Constipation as a Metaphor.
I see the risks. Constipation belongs to the afflictions that encourage jeers from those who aren’t suffering. Gout (which I also endure) is one, boils another, perhaps STDs. Recently I was constipated, perhaps a side-effect of my chemo.
It can be painful but not in this instance. More shocking was the enormous unease and a desperate yearning to be free from the stoppage. I sat alone on our downstairs loo – in a tiny room I’d grown to hate – bereft of all my character; I’d become that unresolved pressure, those physiological urges that suggested relief was possible but that it might never come. When relief did come I expected triumph, but no, I was merely emptied. A husk.
It’s the seeming endlessness that robs you of what you most prize. Of being yourself. Death, after all, is merely oblivion. In this, one is suspended and patently useless.
It’s not something one tends to discuss but there can be rewards. Simply writing: Now I am not constipated - you bastard.
Moral: Life offers many blog subjects.
Following a stroke, which has reduced the power of my body's whole left side, I have suffered constipation (if left untreated by daily doses of Fybogel and morning prunes). The doc. suggests it has been caused by the stroke, which has reduced peristalsis.
ReplyDeleteAvus: The main consideration with constipation is to be patient, not to overtreat it. Prune juice is a mild laxative but after eight hours or so, it seemed to be having no effect on me. Unwisely I moved up to senna pods. That too seemed to be working slowly and then came the avalanche, turning the house into a sewage farm. Not only that but the "loosening" effect takes a long time to disperse.
Deletei agree with patience (and a good read on Kindle whilst "seated"). I have avoided Senna - Fybogel has a gentle action and a sachet twice a day, morning and evening, stirred into water (to which I add a dash of lime juice) does the trick. I put 7 whole dried prunes into my morning Allbran flakes, with a few grapes and all is usually well. (Doctor Avus)
DeleteOur moral concepts, based on whatever, define anything relating to bowel movements as dirty. If it were different, toilets would not be called bathrooms or powder rooms or whatever to pretend it's something shameful and ugly that happens there. And if I had my say, would always be fitted with a small library and maybe a radio - our downstairs loo has both.
ReplyDeleteFor decades, this has also been reflected in research. I remember years ago, at a conference talk someone mentioned that our digestive system is our real brain and the hoots of laughter from the (medical expert) audience.
Anyway, to stock your new library, I suggest this excellent book:
Gut, by Guilia Enders, (new edition 2017)
Watch her here, you'll enjoy it:
https://www.ted.com/talks/giulia_enders_the_surprisingly_charming_science_of_your_gut
Sabine: Thanks especially for this response. I wasn't interested in constipation as such, and it does raise conversational barriers. What struck me was the mental rather than physical assault it inflicts, no doubt because of its associated inhibitions. For twenty-four hours or more I was diminished as a person; it wasn't a time for intellect; more the life of a garden slug than that of homo sapiens..
DeleteOn the wider appreciation of what goes on "down there" WS may have got in first: "He was a man of an unbounded stomach" (Henry VIII). "He which hath no stomach for this fight..." (Henry V). "This rudeness is a sauce to his good wit, Which gives men stomach to digest his words With better appetite.“ (Julius Caesar)
Also, more surprising, Jack London: "This joy of living? This exultation of life? This inspiration, I may well call it? It comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when the stomach is in trim and and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well."
I was aware of Gut the book, though I thought it was published earlier than 2017. In the UK there used to be - perhaps still is - a learned-paper magazine with the same name. I approved, saw it as a reduction of medical pomposity.
I liked Giulia's bit on the inner sphincter responding to "a test sample". Of course, of course, I told myself, many times during that horrible day-and-a-bit. Of course this was after the event when I resumed my more normal objectivity. Thanks for that
Sabine's comment reminds me that "khaki" has the equivalent meaning of "shit" in Hindu, although the old British Indian Army adopted it for their field uniform colour as it can also mean "dust".
ReplyDeleteAvus: "Kacky" (I'm being phonetic) was still in common use during my youth. Mainly as metaphor. Probably now replaced by doo-doo.
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