Side Effected from the Recesses of My Guts

Sigh. It's time to talk about diarrhea.

TW: Poop, ED, gross stuff

At 3am on Sunday, I woke up with awful pain and a gurgling sensation I could hear through my stomach’s layers of muscle, fat, and fading tattoos. What happened in my bathroom in those dark hours of the night wasn’t unusual since starting chemo, but it was horrific nonetheless, lasting hours and filling its tiny confines with sounds and smells wrought from hell.

I was in there, simultaneously whimpering and blasting, until almost 6am when I finally limped back to bed, feeling drained of life force. My soul was sucked out of my butthole. When I woke up, my mouth felt stuffed with a rolled up towel, like I was the crack beneath a stoner teenager’s bedroom door. Parts of what I assume are my intestines, stung. I looked in the mirror and I saw this guy.

I was bound to the couch the entire next day, chugging water and Gatorade, and consuming hours of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” I was severely dehydrated, but at least I’m not thirstier than Whitney Leavitt. And for days following, I slowly recovered and continued to tussle with my inflamed bowels.

It was one of my worst bouts of diarrhea in this whole shitty (literal) process, and believe me there’s been some real bangers in the last 10 weeks. No. 1 on that list was after my first round of chemo. If it isn’t obvious yet, this is going to be the poop edition of this newsletter. If poop talk grosses you out, and the realization that we are all simply meat bags emitting uncontrollably, forced into surrender by the whims of illness, maybe skip this one.

They first started the day after my very first chemo. “They” being the shits. I was heavily warned by my oncologist and several others that one major side effect to chemotherapy is diarrhea or constipation. Not to brag but I’ve had GI issues forever, so I naively didn’t take the warnings that seriously. This ain’t my first rodeo etc. Fearing constipation, I decided to eat some prunes AND ALSO drink some milk of magnesia. Alex, you rotten-tummy idiot.

My mom, my sister Gaby, and I were leaving Trader Joe’s when I felt something below deck. A little trapped wind hoping to be released from its chamber. While I would prefer to crop dust within places that strike my ire, like an Anthropologie, I figured letting it out in the airy safe zone of the parking lot was fine. I released and…oh. Oh no. That felt shaped. Too shaped. I looked over at Gaby and spoke aloud the possibility I feared most. “Dude. I think I shit my pants.”

What’s beautiful about sisters, especially ones that are close and unburdened by squeamishness, is that they’ve seen you at your most disgusting. We have four decades of pimples popped, ingrowns removed with safety pins, and mystery weird things examined between us. So when I asked her to check if it was, indeed, poop, she didn’t hesitate to peek down my pants the way you do a baby’s diaper. “Yeah,” she confirmed. “You shit yourself.”

For the short ride home, including a pitstop at Pavilions, I laid in the backseat of her car stomach down. I honestly thought it was pretty funny. Just another stop in an Oregon Trail of humiliations that is my life. What I didn’t know then was that it was the first sword thrown at what would become a long, bloody war with my guts. The Trader Joe’s shart of foreshadowing.

Two days later, the massacre began. A dam broke. I was reminded of this scene from the perfect television comedy “Primo” that should have been on for 12 seasons. (Yes, I wrote on this show.)

Every human being has had diarrhea. It’s fucking terrible. The diarrhea itself wasn’t surprising. I was warned, after all. What shocked me, what pained me in ways I never anticipated, was the volume. It never ends. One day alone, I got to 10 bathroom trips and then stopped counting because it bummed me out so much. Another day, by 10 am I had gone four times. How?! Where does it find more stuff inside me to forcibly extricate???!! Sometimes I look in the bowl worried my gallbladder or a rib will be sitting in there.

The diarrhea doesn’t stop unless you make it stop. I thought because it’s a side effect, it’s supposed to happen, so I had to just let it happen. That triggered my history with disordered eating and laxative abuse. There’s always part of my brain whispering “this is good, this will make your stomach flat,” no matter how much work I’ve done on myself to quiet it. I worried there was part of me that wanted it to happen, and that’s why I didn’t stop it. I was given the perfect excuse to backslide into harmful behavior, and I couldn’t allow that.

I called the nurse triage hotline and she told me to take some goddamn Imodium. I sheepishly was like “okay, ma’am. I’m sorry,” and started taking the medicine. But by then it was too late. I let it go too long. As I was getting ready before bed late on a Friday night, I went to the bathroom. Diarrhea again. Only this time, there was deep red blood in the toilet. Lots of it. And when I wiped, there were large blood clots.

Panic set in. I came out of the bathroom and burst into tears to Andrew, saying something is wrong. The nurse at the triage center hotline told me to go to the emergency room right away because it was possibly internal bleeding. In tears, Andrew held me and I confessed something that was weighing on me hard when all the diarrhea started hitting me.

Through sobs, I admitted I was embarrassed. I felt gross and not cute. I was tired of shitting. I was scared he was repelled by me, turned off by the shit hydrant that was now my body.

We tend to keep bathroom stuff in the bathroom, and honestly that works for me. If a fart happens, if we hear the other rip up the toilet, no one says anything. We’re adults over 40 in a committed relationship, not Beavis and Butt-Head. All it takes is one boyfriend doing that nasty dude thing where they cup their fart in their hand and toss it in your face to shut that shit down.

But after that breakdown, I noticed him talking more about my poop and helping me in the bathroom in ways I didn’t even really need. Like walking me to the toilet at the infusion center, wrangling my IV line, and placing me on the toilet. It was his way, I think, to break the barrier and show me he’s here – for all of it. He never comments on smell (unless I burned through our fanciest candle by leaving it on all night) or winces at having to clean the bathroom, and it makes me feel less like a foul porta-potty brought to life by a witch’s spell.

Truly, there’s no bigger sign of love, of devotion, than cleaning up someone’s shit; in accepting every part of a person, and caring for it. Even their poo. I saw it with my mom when my dad had cancer; how she gently changed his diaper when he was too sick to stand anymore. I see it with all my parent friends who have their beautiful linen tops and crisp button downs splattered by their child’s blowout. If Andrew or my mom or my sisters or brother or best friends or anyone I love needed me to wipe their ass, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

Still, it’s hard to accept being this vulnerable. I spent most of my life petrified of someone in a public bathroom hearing me toot or pooping at a guy’s house. That changed with time and not giving a fuck, and being comfortable with being a human.

While I’ve long rejected antiquated notions of femininity where women shouldn’t talk about their bodies in crass or simply honest terms — and thankfully the culture shifted this way so much so that we get the amazing diarrhea scene in “Bridesmaids” and even TikTok trad wives talk about their nasty doo-doo’s — it’s still hard to be the woman who dumps. Especially now as it forms a major part of my cancer experience. There’s no other option.

I didn’t expect having tsunami level diarrhea to upset me so much. I thought it would be unpleasant but manageable, but no. Even as I pop Imodium and Lomotil (another anti-diarrheal medication that’s prescription only) like gummy bears, I still don’t know when and how hard it will hit. I have to warn friends who have us over to their place, and apologize profusely for the possibility of destroying their bathroom. Every piece of food that lands in front of me is a threat.

During our Mother’s Day lunch at the Burbank Black Angus, a few bites sent me speed-walking to the toilet. While I was in there doing my abominable business, I heard a mother ask her little daughter if she was okay. In her sweet little voice she replied, “That wasn’t me.” No. It was me. I’m the one blackening this Angus. I will never take for granted a normal poop again.

The vulnerability and embarrassment I’ve felt on top of the actual physical pain and dehydration as my body has become a factory of daily indignities is often overwhelming. Learning to live with this particular side effect is an ongoing struggle. I laugh, I cry, I question why this is happening to me, a beautiful innocent girl who deserves a well-functioning gastrointestinal system. This diarrhea is a real “Steel Magnolias.”

At about the two week post-chemo mark, my body begins to calm down. A nurse comes to my house twice a week to administer an IV drip to save me from the diarrhea causing even bigger harm. I feel normal, less in pain, and can move around with less fear of blowing up a Nordstrom Rack toilet.

Then I have another round of chemo and it starts all over again. But that one week or so is bliss. I tell myself this is part of the hard, often ugly, process of fighting cancer, and one day it will be over. I feel uncomfortable with the reality that I’m suffering, and try to skirt around this by shoving it to the back of my mind until it screams forward. It feels bad, but I don’t need to make it worse by shitting on myself, figuratively.

I just have to live with it, and work to control so I don’t tag team with the cancer and hurt myself. My body is going through something, and with it comes agony and mortification. But in taking care of myself, and being taken care of by the people who love me, shit and all, I can feel some comfort and relief.