By: Suzanne Johnson

Let’s Talk About Poop

Like many stories, this one starts at the end—my rear end to be exact.

Back in the spring of 2006 I would have called it “irregularity” or another polite euphemism. That’s just how I was raised. In a Southern household that didn’t talk about feelings or failures or family history, we repressed. Any enlightened discussion of bowel dysfunction was properly limited to the dog when I was growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee.

In fact I repressed so well I spent the first half of my life in utter constipation. For me, going to the bathroom was about as fun as confession—you’re supposed to feel better but the effort far outweighs the reward. So imagine my surprise years later, age 41 and living in New Jersey, I experienced a strange new sensation called diarrhea.

At first I reasoned. Happens to everyone, right? The shelves at CVS boasted an array of OTC medications in every imaginable form. Liquids! Powders! Pills! Suppositories! It was comforting that the entire pharma industry had my back and my bowel. Before long the OTC drugs had restored me to my blissfully constipated ways.

Later that same year, I caught two viruses in fairly short succession. With the first cold I missed five days of work and completely lost my voice, coughing away for several weeks. Around this time I scheduled my annual checkup with my internal medicine physician in New York. Let’s call her “MD #1” for those keeping track.

MD #1 performed blood work—one of the few times anything about me has been assessed as “normal”—and suggested it was likely that year’s seasonal virus.

A second bad cold laid me up in bed while I attended a communications conference in Santa Fe. I’d organized a dinner there with some close colleagues but was too sick to attend myself. Tom, a dear friend who knows only the imminent threat of death would keep me from an expense-paid dinner with wine, called me when the group returned to the hotel. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I’m concerned about you.”

“I feel sicker than a dead dog,” I rasped in a voice even Kathleen Turner wouldn’t recognize. After popping cold medicine I felt nominally better and flew home to recover.

At the time it was super easy to dismiss these bouts as minor deviations from health, or part of the broader human germ experience. It was the Chinese take-out…everyone gets bad colds…the bacteria on the subway alone could spark a global pandemic. It didn’t occur to me there might be a bigger story.

Early the next year when I turned 42, I began to experience vague complaints, what the medical world so-not-helpfully deems “non-specific” symptoms: fatigue, a dry voice, dry eyes and a dry mouth. Every important part of my body seemed to be shriveling up from dryness, like an Egyptian mummy except I was alive and didn’t live anywhere near the desert. I increased my daily water intake but that didn’t help. I didn’t smoke and wasn’t taking any provocative medications. There was another encounter with diarrhea.