A recent visitor to a blog I work for sent an email with a subject line reading “My Painful External Hemorrhoids Nightmare Story” that was really open and honest. I responded after reading it to ask if it would be okay to write an article based on what they shared. They said it would be fine as long as I didn’t use his last name.
“Debbie from Cedar Rapids, Iowa” is a single mother of a young child who has to work two low-paying part-time jobs to pay the bills. She always put on her best happy face for her daughter, her friends and her family. Her approach to managing stress was to bottle it up and keep all her worries to herself. When her daughter slept, Debbie ate a lot of junk food to reduce her stress.
Amazingly, she was able to maintain an attractive figure without any exercise outside of her job. Her late-night junk food binges led her to develop chronic constipation. She ignored the first sign that an external hemorrhoid was forming. After defecating, she felt what she said she felt like a bee sting and felt a small growth when she wiped herself.
Like many people, she ignored it thinking it would go away on its own. Within a month she had a large bleeding hemorrhoid that she could not ignore. She got so bad that she had to wear spandex shorts under her work uniforms to avoid embarrassing traces of blood. The itching and pain were constant. She was always there to remind him that her condition was not going away anytime soon.
The only temporary relief she found was using over-the-counter hemorrhoid creams. The external hemorrhoid was not shrinking because she had let it go too long untreated. Her coworkers, friends and family members noticed that she now walked differently. That is a very embarrassing life situation to experience in addition to hemorrhoid pain. Nobody likes to tell other people that they suffer from hemorrhoids.
The logical approach for people is to make an appointment with a hemorrhoid doctor. Debbie had two things against her. She was too embarrassed to go see a doctor and she had a phobia of doctors. She had no problem taking her daughter to the doctor, but she had developed a real phobia after having a major panic attack during a doctor’s visit as a patient.
It had been a year since the big panic attack happened, but that fear of having another one created a phobia for the doctors. I understand your feelings because I have a friend who has great health insurance coverage but will never see a doctor unless it’s serious.
They also have a phobia of hospitals and doctors. They told me once that they don’t want to have blood tests or health checkups because they don’t want to know if they have a medical condition like cancer. They think that if they don’t know they have a medical condition then it doesn’t exist. Avoidance always leads to more health problems. Debbie was avoiding having her external hemorrhoids removed.
It got to the point where the external hemorrhoid grew and became infected. The bread came back too. Infected hemorrhoids cause serious health problems. Her parents had started taking care of her daughter more and more because of Debbie’s health problem. Not liking what they were seeing happening to Debbie, they took her to see a doctor who specialized in hemorrhoids.
The mind is powerful. In the waiting room, Debbie had a huge panic attack and felt like an elephant was on her chest and joker faces were staring at her. The thing about panic attacks is that the person who has one always thinks that all eyes are on them. This raises anxiety levels and a fight or flight reaction to the situation. Debbie wanted to leave immediately. Her parents and a nurse calmed her down.
The doctor she explained had a severely infected external hemorrhoid that needed laser hemorrhoid surgery to remove it ASAP. The word surgery makes any patient’s heart race. Debbie had no choice. Her health was in serious jeopardy from the hemorrhoid infection. She made a full recovery from laser hemorrhoid surgery and is back to living a hemorrhoid free life.
What really touched me about Debbie’s email was that she candidly told me that her painful nightmare of hemorrhoids has finally stopped, but now her anxiety and panic attacks are more frequent. She shared that she was not going to ignore the condition like she did with her external hemorrhoid.