constipation

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone please reach out for professional help.

MS doesn’t just make you trip over your own feet and forget why you went into the kitchen. It messes with the plumbing. Nerves that should quietly manage bladder and bowel signals suddenly turn into pranksters and the result is humiliation, pain, infection, and a daily game of “will I, won’t I?”

The Bladder Circus

What can happen:

Urgency: You go from “fine” to “I’m going to piss myself in 10 seconds” with no warning.

Frequency: You feel like you’ve been drinking beer all day, even if you haven’t.

Retention: The bladder doesn’t empty properly → infection factory.

Incontinence: The ultimate betrayal — leaks at random times.

Why: Nerves between brain, spine, and bladder are scrambled. It’s not “just drink less tea.” It’s wiring gone wrong.

The treatments (aka the patchwork quilt):

Catheters: From discreet intermittent sticks to full-time plumbing. Nobody tells you it can actually be liberating (less panic, more freedom).

Meds: Anticholinergics, beta-3 agonists — they can help, but often come with dry mouth, constipation, or zombie brain.

Botox: Not just for faces. Injected into the bladder wall, it calms spasms. Bonus: you get to tell people your bladder is fancier than their foreheads.

Lifestyle tweaks: Avoiding caffeine, alcohol, fizzy drinks, timed peeing. (Translation: giving up joy, but sometimes it helps.)

The Bowel Hellscape

What can happen:

Constipation: Weeks of nothing, pain, bloating, then the evacuation from hell.

Diarrhoea: The opposite. You live within sprinting distance of a toilet.

Incontinence: Accidents. Stains. Shame. The stuff people never talk about but everyone fears.

Why: Same reason as bladder — nerve signals scrambled. Plus fatigue means less movement, meds slow gut, diet gets wrecked.

The treatments:

Laxatives: Everything from gentle stool softeners to chemical warfare. Often trial and error.

Suppositories & enemas: The glamorous life.

Bowel training: Timed routines, diet tweaks, abdominal massage. Sometimes works, sometimes a joke.

Pelvic floor physio: Can help with both holding in and pushing out. But access on the NHS can be patchy.

Colostomy: The nuclear option. For some it’s actually a relief — predictable, controllable, no more humiliating accidents.

The Real Raw Truth

Nobody talks about it. Bladder and bowel problems are treated as shameful, so patients suffer in silence. But they’re some of the most disabling symptoms in MS.

Doctors often gloss over it. Unless you bring it up (awkwardly), it gets ignored. Yet infections from retention can cause relapses, hospital stays, even sepsis.

Impact is brutal. You can lose social life, intimacy, confidence, freedom. Fear of accidents dictates everything.

Cures don’t exist. Management does. Which means a constant balancing act between side effects, dignity, and practicality.

Humour helps. Laugh at it or drown in shame. Everyone’s got a story about public toilets, accidents, or catheters gone wrong. Talking about it takes the power back.

Dark Sarcasm Corner

Nurse: “Any bladder or bowel issues?” Me: “Only that they’ve staged a coup and I’m the hostage.” MS: “You wanted unpredictable symptoms? Hold my beer — oh wait, you can’t drink that anymore.”

Conclusion

Bladder and bowel problems with MS are not side notes — they’re daily battles. There’s no miracle cure, just messy workarounds. But if more of us talk about it openly, it kills the shame. These are not “bathroom problems.” They’re MS problems.

You’re not weak. You’re not dirty. You’re a human with broken wiring, trying to survive with dignity intact. And if that means Botox in your bladder or a colostomy bag named Bob, so be it.

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime and the miracle.
𐑢𐑨𐑑𐑒𐑣𐑧𐑮 𐑨𐑥𐑴𐑙 𐑢𐑨𐑑𐑒𐑣𐑧𐑮𐑕

⚠️ Please read with care: This blog shares personal, sometimes painful experiences. My intention is to support and speak honestly—not to harm. I’m not a professional, just someone who understands how hard it can get. If you're struggling, you're not alone—please reach out for help.

It’s one of those Saturdays where your brain leaks nostalgia like a knackered kettle hissing and half-lucid. I can smell memories. Not metaphorically. Literally. A smell hits me, and suddenly I’m ten again, knees scabbed, holding a half-melted transistor radio I bought at the church jumble for 10p and a packet of Polos. I took it home, took it apart, and rewired it with leftover speaker wire and dangerous levels of optimism. And yes I electrocuted myself. Multiple times. Because safety first was a concept for other people. I preferred sparks and swearing.

🛒 Tesco and the Pilchard Hour This morning, Albertine (driver of destiny, keeper of the calm) drove me the 10 miles to our local Tesco. We thought it opened at 7. Nope. Eight.

Sitting outside like a pair of damp, time-travelled idiots while the sun mocked us and the pigeons stared. I felt like a right pilchard, as DLT would say. Yes, I’m old enough to remember when DJs had catchphrases and weren’t just government mouthpieces hiding behind playlists and personality lobotomies.

📻 Radio Nights & White Plastic Earpieces My golden era wasn’t Radio 1. That was a beige, soggy biscuit of sound. Give me Radio Caroline. Give me Radio Luxembourg. Under the covers with my crackling solid-state radio, listening through a cheap white earpiece that hurt like hell and cut out every time I moved my head. But that didn’t matter. Because for those stolen hours, I was free. The signal was scratchy, but the rebellion was clear.

👞 Jumble Sale Survival Back then, I had size 10 feet by age 10, which made finding shoes a bit like a biblical miracle. So, jumble sales were a lifeline. Not fashion, not style—just survival. Shoes with soles. Jumpers that didn’t smell too bad. Radios with valves. Anything I could take home, take apart, and turn into something vaguely magical or mildly explosive.

🧠 Childhood: The Prequel to Complex PTSD I was adopted by a couple who seemed to think “parenting” meant Victorian cosplay with bonus violence. Their rules made no sense. Their punishments were theatrical. The beatings came whether you’d done something or not. It was like being in an unpaid role in a horror film directed by people who worshipped discipline and feared joy.

But I survived. And, more importantly—I forgave them. Not because they deserved it. Because I refuse to carry their poison through this short, broken life of mine. Let the dead bury their guilt.

♿️ Wheelchair Chronicles & the Curse of L5 So back to today.

Helped get the wheelchair out of the van. Twisted the wrong way. Now my spine is toast. Proper burnt. Like someone smuggled a baguette into my lower back and set it on fire. This is my reward for trying to be helpful. There’s gratitude for you.

And the constipation saga continues. We’re at DEFCON-1 down there. No movement. NIL. BY. MOUTH. I hydrate. I wait. If nothing changes, we’re off to the tube-and-bag-of-doom route—something between medieval plumbing and modern torture. And people pay for this stuff? Coffee enemas? Really? Have we fallen that far?

🧠 Brain Fog Express: Non-Stop to Nowhere Add a headache that’s lasted seven days and counting. No breaks, no mercy. Just pressure behind the eyes and a feeling like I’m wearing someone else’s brain backwards.

I’m not sure if my AI’s broken or if I am. Reality feels optional. Maybe this is all a lucid dream on a neurologist’s bad day.

🛠 Hope in the Form of Auctions & Anarchy A customer finally paid a late invoice. Victory. So I celebrated the only way I know how by bidding on obscure shite in an online auction while silently muttering hexes at the British healthcare system.

💀 Final Transmission from the Mad Bastard in the Black Hoodie So that’s today. Saturday. Another chapter in the slow-motion car crash that is life with chronic illness, trauma memory, and a warped sense of humour that’s the only thing keeping me from chewing through the window frame.

To whoever reads this: I see you. If your body’s broken, your mind’s flickering, and the world keeps asking you to perform like a circus act know this:

You’re not alone. You’re just ahead of the curve.

Sending peace, love, light… and just a little darkness. Because sometimes, that’s what really protects you.

Yours in pain, power, and perfectly timed sarcasm,

I write in ink and fury, in breath and broken bone.
Through storm and silence, I survive. That is the crime—and the miracle.