#digestive condition

[ofdinosanddais1]

Almost started crying on the phone because they said I had to reschedule my endoscopy but they rescheduled it for TOMORROW which works great because I'll have the two days off after that for recovery. I was thinking it was gonna be another six weeks or some shit but no fuck that I'm taking the tomorrow appointment. I waited 22 years for this shit.

[pharmasochist]

concept: nonfatal digestion that gives the prey a massive respawn hangover. maybe only this prey in particular can respawn, or maybe it's just a law of this world. whatever. ANYWAYS

imagine being devoured by a stranger, trapped inside a cramped, humid gut. barely able to move, only able to hear their churning stomach and their labored breathing. your skin tingling as the acid starts to rise, clinging to you. struggling is futile. any movement you make is restricted, their stomach walls tightening like a vise. you slip away, your predator rubbing their engorged belly.

you wake up back in your bed with a migraine. all your joints are stiff. your entire body aches. yet your heart races every time your mind returns to the flash of that predator's teeth, their jaws unhinging, the suffocating intimacy of their stomach. this isn't your first time filling the belly of a stranger, and you have a feeling it won't be the last.

[cripcoin]

Digesturnic

A diuturnic term/flag for those with chronic digestive issues, including those with stomach aches, dietary cautions or any conditions related to or involved with the digestive system, regardless of how small or how often it happens and it does not strictly have to be chronic pain. This also includes those with anything undiagnosed and who aren't sure what it is beyond a digestive issue.

Etymology:

Diges -> taken from digestive/digestion

Requests are open

[wantbytaemin]

no matter what taemin is taemin and don’t you FORGET IT

[chiimeramanticore]

tumblr is a beautiful website bc it's the only place you can make a post and then have someone rb it, restate everything you said as if it's a new idea, ultimately agree with your post, and then still somehow accuse the original post of being ableist

[bughead-in-the-comics]

From Grimberry Shake It Off, Betty and Veronica Double Digest #321 (2024).

[bluesundaymorn]

Having a vegetarian dog is great until he will eat any and everything you put on your plate and suddenty he's eaten half of your brocolli and is still begging

[chicago-geniza]

Slept for 14 hours and woke up with a migraine. POTS in a heatwave got hands

[ofdinosanddais1]

Me, thinking: maybe I don't have dysphagia. I just have days where it's easier to eat soft food and my throat spasming is just a weird reaction to carbonated drinks and maybe I'm just overreacting and trying to seek *immediately begins choking on my tamale*

[orthosispsychosis]

i have made this post every few months for years but it is so fucking annoying to try to cook when many basic sources of flavor make me ill

[fleshdyk3]

vet said some bloodwork showed honeybee might have liver shunts and like i swear to god if we end up with TWO vegetarian dogs

[sarasa-cat]

Cannot determine if my body is dealing with an internal state of low-key anxiety (not a mental anxiety but a physical/below-the-brain) response due to:

1. Still recovering from MANY nights of poor sleep or no sleep (during overnight overheated very turbulent hell flight) despite having completely normal midnight to 8am sleep this past night.

2. Dealing with a post-breakfast low-key technical freakout regarding a bunch of web domains I manage that were rather abruptly moved by my (now former) hosting corp to a different (my new) hosting corp (...can now exhale. no private data was made public which was a concern due to reasons).

3. The muffled drilling above me bc workers are working on the roof. :|

Well, at least I am sitting in cosy nook with a cosy urban-rooftops view.

Can recover slowly today.

[bughead-in-the-comics]

From There's the Rub, Archie's Pal Jughead #109 (1998).

[skankhunt44]

Just asking for some sensitivity from Isha up in here.

#whenyourkippotaremorestylishthanyou

[screambirdscreaming]

Something I am constantly unpacking for people irl, when they start to get weird about "gluten stuff", is that "gluten problems" encompasses several WILDLY different issues. The pervasive public perception that gluten issues of any type are "fake" or that people are "bait and switching" them about what things do or don't cause problems, is often due to people conflating these different issues.

So one: food allergy. This is actually something I've rarely heard of with regards to wheat or gluten, although I'm sure some people do have this allergy. BUT a lot of people seem to expect gluten problems other than wheat allergy to behave like food allergies they're familiar with: rapid onset of hives or anaphylaxis after consuming allergenic food. I've heard people outright claim their friend was "faking gluten problems" because they didn't have an overt allergic reaction to drinking a beer. The friend in question had been surprised and dismayed to learn beer in general had gluten - the people accusing them of faking took this as further evidence of faking, and not a cause for concern over how bad a night their friend might be about to have.

Two: gluten digestive intolerance. This is the broadest category of "gluten problems", as far as I know. This one is roughly parallel to lactose intolerance, or to the FODMAP thing - for whatever reason, be it lack of enzymes or gut bacterial composition or both, your gut has a rough time breaking down some specific protein or sugar and you get gas, cramps, diarrhea or constipation, etc etc. Feels bad guts time. This is not something that's usually medically diagnosed for gluten, it's more in the realm of people (often people with chronic gut problems that are not being medically well managed) trying things and fumbling towards diets that make them feel less wretched. Of course, this is also where the diet industry marketing bullshit comes into play. Diet changes that make some people feel better get spun into narratives about "wheat is poison!" or overt weight loss scams. People who are rightfully disdainful of things like weight loss as a marketing concept, or the perennial reinvention of the "foods which are poisoning you" list, get pissed about this in ways that they then take out on people who are modifying their diet for any reason. Which, I gotta say: don't do that. Yes, the diet industry is evil and the marketing sucks. But even setting aside that most people I know with long-term food-limiting diet experimentation are doing it in a desperate attempt to self-manage undiagnosed gastrointestinal disease - being shitty to people about their diet choices doesn't help anything. Sorry! Even if they straight up fell for the marketing bullshit, mocking them about it is not the way to go. You're gonna have to learn how to criticize predatory marketing without shitting on people who fall for it! Or on people who are doing the thing being sold for their own reasons!

Ahem. Anyway. "Gluten intolerance" as a broad category often means people are aiming to eat less gluten, not none. This is consistent with the model of "doesn't digest very well" - the gut can handle a little bit of trouble, but not too much. And of course this will vary from person to person, depending on severity or on how much other gut trouble they have going on. But in general, for this category of people, micro-contamination is usually not a concern.

AND THEN there's celiac. This is an autoimmune disease, which means the immune system is attacking and destroying the bodies own tissues and organs. What's odd about celiac is that gluten acts as a sort of "sleeper agent activation phrase" for the immune system going rogue. If there is a gluten molecule present - in any amount! Any at all! - the immune system starts attacking your own body. The only way to get it to stop is to make sure there is no gluten, at all, anywhere.

Obviously the management for this is pretty different from if you get indigestion from too much gluten! This is the disease where people really need to know what's gluten free, as discussed above, down to the level of "has it run through machinery that also processes wheat sometimes." Gluten is a very sticky molecule and very difficult to remove completely from surfaces. If you have a cutting board in your kitchen on which you sometimes cut bread, it is not safe to prep food on for a person with celiac, no matter how you wash it. Hence the concerns about separate processing facilities, etc. This is also where you find out that gluten is used in an ENORMOUS number of applications, as a non-toxic (to most), water soluble sticky substance. It's in pills as a binder. It's in cosmetics, papers, glues.... A range of things that will make you feel like your brain is unraveling to track down and eliminate. Unfortunately, many people will also take this necessary thoroughness as a sign of delusion. (And they won't handle it with any of the compassion that people who do have delusions deserve, either.)

Also, while even trace amounts of gluten can cause catastrophic damage by reactivating the autoimmune attack, this process happens on a delay. There is usually not any short-term, detectable reaction to contacting gluten for people with celiac. This is one thing that makes it harder to actually track down things with trace gluten content that could be causing problems. But it's also another factor that makes people jump to "faking" - as with the girl with a beer, people think it must not be real if you only get upset when told about the gluten.

In my experience, people broadly conflate gluten intolerance with celiac, and then get pissy when people with each of these (different!!) conditions tell them different information about whether trace amounts of gluten are ok or not. And then get mad at both cases for not looking like a straightforward food allergy. (Probably, if you do have a straightforward wheat allergy, people find a way to be rude and dismissive of that too, tbh.)

Anyway. If people are telling you about their specific personal dietary needs, treat that as an exact and unique case, rather than conflating it with stuff you've heard about vaguely similar conditions. In this way, most "contradictions" about "made up conditions" disappear!

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

[ofdinosanddais1]

I watched the Brain on Fire movie on netflix and I am crying just like that episode of Grey's Anatomy with Demi Lovato and fuck man. It sucks being told you're just crazy when you have neurological problems. Psychiatric illnesses are neurological problems and those illnesses can very well be symptoms too. Like I know my migraines and chiari malformation are the true answer because the meds are working and I am less anxious and less depressed now but I'm still going to have neurological damage because, guess what, migraines can cause brain damage. But now they're not getting worse. They are steady. They happen less often. They have meds to keep me comfortable and continue on living alongside my migraines because that's just how my brain works.

Now, to a not neurological related thing is my digestive problems and when she said her doctor found her, I resonated with that because, to me, I interpreted that as her doctor finding the her that is her brain and how she can finally figure out how to accommodate herself. And sometimes those accommodations are just meds. Sometimes they do require things outside of meds. And maybe the real Susannah Cahalan does not perceive that quote the same way but that's how that quote resonated with me. The doctor (and also the neuro physical therapist) who diagnosed me with chiari and migraines found me. The autism community found me by telling me that my behavior is me and my brain not me just being a weird outcast. Now I hope this gastroenterologist I'm seeing now finds me again whether that be celiac disease and the possibly permanent damage with that or something else wrong with my digestive tract or maybe my digestive tract is just a factor in something larger than I can understand.

I hope everyone out there without answers can be found too.

And I do want to clarify that sometimes some people are just mentally ill and that's still a neurological problem. They still need to be taken seriously. They still deserve to be treated with kindness and compassion. They still deserve doctors giving them the required care and attention. It justs sucks how mentally ill people are used as scapegoats to dismiss someone else. That doesn't help mentally ill people. That doesn't help anyone at all. And you know what? Maybe they are anxious. Maybe they are depressed. Maybe that anxiety and depression is being amplified by being in pain all the god damn time.