The Soreness After a Flare-Up

Facing a health issue is never easy, especially if it is unpredictable and unknown as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

The first very annoying part is that to get a diagnosis, a doctor has to rule out all the other gut issues, and only then, they call it IBS. It feels disappointing, but this is all the medicine could do for now.

The other annoying part is that you have to figure out which symptoms might belong to IBS. It might have such a variety of effects on your daily life, that it becomes hard to understand if they are related. Stress, bloating, tiredness, drowsiness, hair loss, the rush to run to the bathroom. You name it.

To me, a side that is SO hard to explain is the pain and the feeling I have after a flare-up.

My recent IBS flare

It happened recently and I cannot wrap my mind on how I managed to land a flare-up. I had a simple dinner. I had some good meat, some carrots, few cherry tomatoes, everything should have been IBS-proof. But NO. My gut had other plans to replace my evening walk.

I spent an hour in pain, and another one trying to understand if something was about to happen, or if all of that was just a fake alarm.

Well, I felt quite poorly for the following hour, followed by a well-deserved relief.

The relief didn't last long, as the after-episode kicked in.

Post-flare pain

It is such a weird feeling. I'm still bloated, still exhausted, but now I have that empty-irritated sensation that doesn't let me fall asleep easily.

Let's start by saying that, for me, that feeling of emptiness sounds like a miracle. It's honestly quite pleasant as I'm not used to it anymore. Unfortunately, it does not look on the outside, as I feel on the inside. I still look bloated and inflamed, because I am. It has been so long since I started having that horrible impression that my bowel is still half full, that I enjoy every second of that after-war feeling.

The closest sensation to the after-flare-up that comes to my mind is the migraine-hangover but in my gut.

It feels like it's foggy in there, you don't understand what happened, and after the pain comes the soreness.

There's a shadow of discomfort that is still annoying. It's a sensation of having sandpaper inside. It's like when for some reason your gum is inflamed, but it's inside and in a much bigger organ.

Is it a reset?

It takes days to recover. After I managed to fall asleep, I woke up feeling much better and balanced, but every time I eat something, I feel pain.

Sometimes this kind of episode just happens and I wonder if it's just my body that just decides to "reset" and start from scratch. It feels quite silly to write this down, but I hope someone will relate.

It feels like the only option we have is to have a balanced low-fodmap diet so that our gut will have the time to rest, recover and hopefully won't face another episode soon.