Paranoia

A couple nights ago I was lying awake, convinced that there was something living inside of me. Like, a parasitic worm of some kind. As you might expect, this realization was distressing. I know that my doctor checked stool samples (that I collected, with little tiny shovels, from a deuce I had to take on newspaper laid out on the ground) and concluded that parasites were not the source of my woes. Still I went back to the thoughts I had, laying in that bed about 14 months ago, just back from China. Then, too, I felt FOR SURE parasites were doing some things in my insides. What I pictured as a worm moving around was just my body's asynchronous damn peristalsis, my doctor assured.

The fact that I had been down this road did not stop me from utterly convincing myself it was indeed a parasite. On one shoulder was an image of doctor, laying out in very rational statements that we already checked for parasites, that if I had a parasite my symptoms would be restricted to the lower half of the GI tract rather than the whole thing, that IBS is the only real conclusion. But on the other shoulder was a statement my nurse made in passing while I was waiting to go in for my endoscopy, casually offering that there are so many parasites you can contract in other parts of the world that they can't even test for. For the first time in probably 400 days my subconscious canceled with my doctor granted an audience to that nurse.

When you are sick for an extended period of time, as I've been for about two years now, you start to become paranoid. Because there hasn't been a firm diagnosis, you can't completely buy into the doctor's prescriptions. For example, I've been back on extended fiber therapy for a few months now and while I have seen some improvement in my symptoms, it has not been a silver bullet. How do I know my body isn't getting better despite the fiber? For every report that probiotics may help soothe the more flagrant flareups of IBS there is one that says the contrary, saying probiotics might do more harm than good in some IBS patients. This lack of certainty is probably the most annoying aspect of having a chronic, vague problem like IBS. Especially since IBS has a strong mental component. If you can't totally buy into the fact that you're on the right treatment path then you're fighting against your brain and your body.

Who knows what I'm going to convince myself of tonight?