Diverticular Disease

I don’t like writing about health problems, but if it could help or inform someone else it is probably worth it. 

A difficult week: exhaustion and weakness, stomach and abdominal pains, bowel problems, sickness, too tired to do anything, even television and Blogger. Dark thoughts. Five days and you are sure the you-know-what is back. Is this how it ends? 

Then a flash of insight. It is probably a diverticular flare-up. Everything fits. This is not just diagnosis by Dr. Google.

Until about 15 years ago I had regular colonoscopies because of my brother’s early death. The last two times I was given a standard feedback form with the box ticked for diverticular disease. No other information or advice. We wondered briefly what it meant and then completely forgot about it. 

Mild symptoms have occurred infrequently through the years, but we never made the connection and assumed it was just me. This time it was worrying because of the severity. And I had a similar episode only a month ago. 

I said it felt like how people describe irritable bowel syndrome. A bit later, Mrs. D. asked what was that box ticked on the last colonoscopy form? 

Apparently, almost all of us have signs of diverticular disease after the age of fifty, but usually without problems. 

If you don’t eat you get weaker and weaker. You have to work out what sets it off, and avoid it. You have to eat small amounts until it starts to improve. Energy drinks help: there are some excellent ones made at Tadcaster in Yorkshire, and Keighley. Landlord Dark is good. One plus is that almost everything they tell you about eating lots of salads and vegetables and fibre is wrong. 

I hope I am right. You often have to work these things out for yourself. 

It is something to consider if you have these symptoms from time to time. And, if you find this diagram revolting, on no account look for any photographs. 

Diverticular Disease

Shoot The Ruddy Sods

Following recent posts about the cats with a bank account and the survivor of the Titanic disaster, I have been browsing further through the BBC archive. This 7-minute gem from 1973, from the Nationwide reporter Bernard Falk, would not have looked out of place in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is about the god-forsaken East Yorkshire seaside resort of Hornsea, and a controversy about a proposed nudist beach that had the locals spitting venom: 

“It’s objectionable. All this sex and every wretched thing, more and more of it.”

“I’m telling you it will attract the wrong class of person ... The hooliganism ... Drinking and everything else. ... You’ll get all the scoundrels out of hell coming ... all the riff-raff out of Hull, Leeds and all over ... And they’ll be breaking in ... And crime.”

“What difference does it make covering their private parts up to their health? I ask you that much. Not the slightest.”

“I don’t think children should be watching people in the nude. This is a family resort. ... Why don’t they find themselves a little plot, fence it in, and cavort about to their hearts’ content?” 

“I don’t think I’d like to meet a party of nudists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZWHVpB21ec

Good East Riding folk like these were in abundance where I grew up, less than forty miles from Hornsea. I sometimes went to a friend’s caravan there, and in the nineteen-thirties my great-grandfather’s cousin owned a newspaper shop in the town. They could be my distant relatives. However, as you may know, Yorkshire Pudding’s formative years were spent not a beach pebble’s throw from the place. Could that man in the Fedora be his dad?