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 skin is prone to
angry red flare-ups of rosacea that had become progressively worse over the previous two years. After the usual creams had failed to work, I booked an appointment with a skin expert. Dr Geoff Mullan is a former NHS surgeon and the co-founder of Human People, a health-screening company which uses diet and lifestyle to treat health issues. After asking me a lot of questions about my health he said: “I think you might have SIBO.”
The symptoms I was describing; the bloating in my upper abdomen, the cramps, the aching joints, the exhaustion, combined with rosacea, were all classic symptoms of SIBO, which stands for small intestine bacterial overgrowth. I’d never even heard of it.
