Or my bowel health. Or a virus. Or allergies up in my sinuses. Or something.

But I do not feel well today. I feel, in fact, like second-rate crap. I feel tired, and nauseous, and weak, and a little dizzy and confused.

In short, I feel ill, and that is why I am sitting here typing to you lovely people and not where I would prefer to be, which is at this month’s BCSFA meeting.

That is the monthly meeting of local nerds that I somewhat spottily attend. I think I have made it to around seventy five percent of the meetings this year, plus or minus ten percent. Sometimes, i just cannot summon up the necessary thrust in order to escape the gravitational pull of my own issues, and I have to decline. Tonight is one of those nights.

But I am trying not to get bummed out about it. You win some, you lose some. I have been feeling sort of ill since Saturday morning, and then I had a pretty serious Irritable Bowl Syndrome attack this afternoon, and that is when I knew I was down for the count, so to speak.

Meh. I will recover soon enough. I already feel like I have been through the worst and right now I am just recovering my strength. It would have been more convenient for all of this to have happened yesterday instead of today, of course. Then I would have recovered by now.

But whatever. It is just a bump on the road, not the end of the world. I will survive.

I think I have always had a touch of IBS. I had what they called a “nervous stomach” back then when I was a kid. Too much excitement and I would get ill.

Kind of a bummer, really.

But for the most part, I learned to avoid that, I guess by becoming mellow and passive. Yet throughout my childhood, I had the occasional attack of what I now know to be IBS. I would have to go to the bathroom and sit on the bowl and the cramps would get worse and worse until they reached a peak, and then the fever would break, I would suddenly feel a million times better, and I would sweat buckets for a few minutes.

One might think it odd that I never told my parents or siblings about these attacks. But they were pretty rare, and after they were over I felt a lot better (yay endorphins), and when you are young you have a remarkable ability to recover from things rapidly, and so it never seemed like that big a deal to me.

It was just a weird, bad thing that happened seemingly at random. So, you know, whatever.

But all that came back to me when I went to a party for the crappy student radio station I used to volunteer at, CIMN, and had an attack so bad, I kept having to hog the one bathroom, with people banging on the door yelling for me to hurry up already.

Understandable, but not helpful. I figure it was the combination of social stress (I did not actually know a lot of these people) plus cheesy snacks, which have been known to irritate my system.

Anyhow, I was super ill and eventually had to beg a ride home from someone (thank you, whoever it was, I know I knew you slightly then but I have totally forgotten you now) and ended up lying on my bed, in the dark, sitting absolutely still in front of an open window (it was early summer), until my system finally calmed down again.

That is still, more or less, how I treat my symptoms after a serious attack. Darkness, coldness, and stillness. Usually I try to sleep, and I must say, if I manage to get to sleep after once the muscle relaxation and the endorphins kick in, it is some of the best sleep ever.

If there was a pill that would give me that kind of sleep, I would commit crimes to get it.

So after the big attack at the party, things were sort of OK for a little while, but once I went back home for the summer, the IBS just plain went berserk. That is when I ended up in the hospital for a few days because the cramping got so bad that I felt like I was dying.

They did a bunch of tests on me and concluded that none of the other indications like coeliac disease or giardia were present before someone eventually came along and said “Oh…. you’re still here? Um…. you can go now. ”

Gotta love hospital efficiency, right?

And over that summer, a lot of bad happened to me. Hypochondria had me in its jaws. Over and over again, I was sure I was dying, sure I could feel cancer inside me, positive I was going to have a heart attack. I started washing my hands eight, ten, twelve times a day. I had absolutely no appetite and could barely eat. I was anemic, dehydrated, and malnourished.

And it was around that time that my maternal grandfather died. I feel bad because I was such a wreck at the funeral and the interment. I wish I had been able to connect with the loss more strong at the time. But I was very ill.

Thus began two years of getting the medical runaround as nobody seems to know what was wrong with me and the only reason that ever ended was that Summerside finally got its own gastroenterologist and she was the only one with the perspicacity to know it was probably IBS.

Even then, tho, I more or less treated myself. The key was to learn not to panic when an attack came on. That was what made them escalate. Just ride it out, knowing it will pass.

That, plus learning a few more tricks (like always checking my sinuses, because sinus headaches bring my IBS on and make it way worse) is what got me here today. I have IBS, but I have it mostly managed. The severe attacks are rare and the minor ones I handle as a matter of course.

So…. that is the history of my bowels.

You can all stop asking about it now.