OPINION My belly had become a liability, prone to swelling up like a balloon and making a spectacle of itself at the most inconvenient moments. When I was chief bridesmaid at my best friend’s wedding, I was congratulated by three different people on my pregnancy. I felt awkward having to tell them that I wasn’t pregnant, just very, very bloated .
This six months pregnant bump was just one of a cluster of symptoms I’d been experiencing for over a year, along with severe abdominal cramping, groan-inducing body aches, extreme tiredness, smatterings of nausea and constipation. My immediate thought was that it must be a women’s health issue because I’d had twins two years prior. Maybe there was some collateral damage.
The cramps felt a lot like period pains , which is probably what set me off down this particular rabbit hole, but they were daily. I would also doom-scroll all the cancers. My GP referred me for ultrasound, which revealed that my ovaries and my womb were fine but still the cramps and bloating continued.
I couldn’t shake the thought that there was a problem, so I booked to see a private gynaecologist, who couldn’t find anything wrong either and asked if I’d considered that it could be IBS . IBS? It literally hadn’t crossed my mind. I thought of several of my friends who suffer with this terribly vague, seemingly untreatable “syndrome” and went home feeling deflated, still no closer to a solution.
Enlightenment came from an unexpected source. My s.