I went to high school with this chick named Elizabeth who could drop a deuce in ten seconds flat. No lie. The day I discovered her toilet sorcery, we were in the gym bathroom during a passing period. She’d said she had to take a shit, so when I heard her pop in and out of the stall next to me before my pee stream even slowed to a trickle, I knew something was up.

“Dude, I thought you had to poop,” I said from behind my swinging door.

“I did,” she said.

“What happened? It went back up?”

“No. I pooped.”

“Wait,” I said, ball of TP in hand. “How did you poop faster than I can pee?”

“I always poop that fast. It just comes out, then I’m done.”

Um, eww? Did she not wipe herself? Elizabeth’s story wasn’t adding up. She’d always struck me as a very clean person. Maybe I missed something.

After flushing and zipping, I swung the door open, looked straight into Elizabeth’s lying, most likely constipated face, and asked for clarification.

“But doesn’t it take time to wipe though? Like, even if the poo comes straight out, how can you be done so fast?’’

“I don’t have to wipe. It just comes out in a big log like this,” she held her index fingers apart as if there were a ruler between them. “I used to try wiping, but there was never anything to clean. The log just slides out and that’s it.”

“Every time? Just one big log? You never get, like, a few small logs or anything?”

“Nope,” she said.

Bamboozled doesn’t even begin to describe the state this conversation left me in. Where did she get off having the easiest bowel movements to ever exist? While some people were stuck on the toilet forcing out little rabbit turds, or spraying the lid with brown sprinkler juice, or both, she was in those stalls chilling like every poop was a tropical vacation, holding a blended margarita with a little pink umbrella and a dang curly straw. Easy peasy, lemon squee—

Fuck Elizabeth. I mean, she was nice and everything, but come on. Why did she get to have such miraculous poops when I didn’t? My digestion was pretty good in high school, but I was in the habit of envying anyone who had a better deal than me. In terms of poop, Elizabeth was winning. I was content with my own bowel movements until I realized this. Envy, not the cutest character trait on my part, I know, but don’t worry. A very important lesson about appreciating what I had was in store.

After a few years of coasting on mediocre poops, for no apparent reason, things started coming out my back door real bloody. I was freaked, but my friends assured me (yes, I really was the type to blab my body horror around town) that I probably just had hemorrhoids and hemorrhoids were a normal thing that happened to people. Aside from the absolutely preposterous notion that a biblical sacrifice hosted by my ass was just a common, low-stakes ailment many people dealt with, I was placated…for a while. But when the occasional whoa-what-the-fuck poo in my mid-twenties became Sundays bloody Sundays, plus bloody Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, most Thursdays, some Fridays, and RED RUM Saturdays in my late twenties, doubts developed.

The progression was alarming, to say the least. Imagine popping a squat to take your regular morning shit and looking down to discover that some homicidal maniac had committed murder in the water right below your unsuspecting cooter, despite the fact you’re an innocent salad eater who doesn’t even consume bread. Not cool, bro. Now I have to do some compulsive googling to get to the bottom of this disaster before I’m forced to comb through the out-of-date list of providers Medi-Cal shipped in that phonebook sized package I shoved in a closet somewhere, and then, god forbid, actually go to the fucking doctor where I’ll either find out they no longer accept my insurance, or, even worse, that they do and they’re ready to mercilessly prod my anal canal.

So, anyway, by the time I exhausted the googleable options and went to urgent care, I’d moved up in society and had a copay. Sixty bucks for some guy to KY my butthole.

“Oh yeah,” he said knowingly. “You’re full of hemorrhoids alright.” Then he pulled his latexed finger out of my behind and prescribed twenty-two grams of supplemental fiber per day, assuring me any storebought brand would do.

That’s it? That’s all it takes? Drown myself in fiber and I’m free? You got it, doc. Thanks a million.

Turns out, according to the average nutrition facts label, twenty-two grams of fiber is approximately 6.400100236 daily servings. Go figure. Most of the supplemental fibers I forced down in this absurd quantity did nothing to prevent my asshole from looking like a Friday the 13th movie.  Psyllium husk was moderately helpful, so naturally, it’s almost impossible to consume. The second that ground up hay hits liquid, it rapidly congeals into a grainy gelatin that sticks in your gullet. Slurping quickly is key to avoiding a choking hazard, and as hilarious as it would be if my autopsy read “asphyxiation by psyllium husk,” I really don’t want the fact that I can’t poop right to be what takes me out of this world. Too humiliating.

The orange flavored kind goes down a bit easier, but it’s literally more sugar than fiber. The amount of goopy cool aide I’d have to drink to follow the doctor’s orders might also lead to my demise via one of the many diseases related to excessive sugar intake, and since the sugar free version contains enough aspartame to kill a rhinoceros, I decided to pass on the tasty kind altogether.

The husk also comes in capsules, but again, the amount I was instructed to take was insane. I can’t swallow twenty pills twice a day forever. I just fucking can’t. The solution? Alternate between gulping chunky goop and popping as many pills as I can take without vomiting in the hopes that I get enough fiber down to trigger a nonviolent bowel movement in the future. Not the greatest way to live, but hey, at least my party years equipped me with practical skills for the job. Chug! Chug! Chug that sludge!

One doctor was very concerned when I told him about my symptoms. For one thing, I was having a lot of smoosh poo, not just the hard-to-push-out kind associated with hemorrhoids. Secondly, I was young, an athlete (back then, anyway, before this catastrophic body officially became junkyard trash), and I’d never been pregnant. I was taking all the fiber. Drinking all the water. He said hemorrhoids didn’t make sense given my lifestyle and ordered a colonoscopy to see what was really going on. I was terrified of what life-altering information might be revealed. Ha! So naïve. So foolish. I’d avoided doctors for so long, I almost forgot how the medical system works. In what universe would a diagnostic procedure that caused immense stress and required me to drink a fucking gallon of laxatives (for one hell of an unpleasant evening) produce answers instead of just spiraling me to the island of castaways where patients with mysterious illnesses go to cry? Certainly not the one I was living in.

The colonoscopy and biopsy came back clean of any major illnesses. No Crohn’s. No ulcerative colitis. No colon cancer like my granny had (RIP). Just a tiny polyp they plucked right out of there, the same way I handle my rogue eyebrows with a set of tweezers. I got a letter from the doctor congratulating me on being fine and telling me to keep taking fiber.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d much prefer not to have some horrible autoimmune disease. But like, if I’m having the symptoms of one anyway, it’s like, well now what the fuck, yuh know?

The next doctor hypothesized I was taking too much fiber, which he said would explain both the constipation and diarrhea, but that fiber in the right quantities was also the treatment for constipation and diarrhea, so, yeah. Fuck me, I guess.

Hail Mary time. I experimented with everything between three and thirty grams of fiber while guzzling more water than a rich person’s lawn during a drought, because if I’d learned one thing, it’s that fiber can’t do jack shit without a river to make it move. I also dabbled in expensive probiotics. Prebiotics. Plant based diets. Cooked food. Raw food. It was all bad, people. A big metaphorical sack of shit instead of the literal shit I needed.

Despite punishing fiber rituals, I ended up with what I was told were grade-four hemorrhoids. I’m pretty sure they were actually grade three, but whatever. Internal and external bitches. A bloody, uncooked, ground sausage fiasco in my pants. Grade four/three/whatever meant the internal kind became so big, one would pop out during every poop and have to be manually shoved back in with my reluctant finger when it didn’t recede on its own. The external kind would expand like they’d taken a fat dose of lip filler. I’d waddle around after every shit waiting for the swelling to calm down. Seriously. Every crap I took. If my butt were a mouth, I could’ve modeled for Juvéderm.

Grade-four/three/fuckmylife arrived shortly after I found myself newly single at the age of thirty. What a time. Societal shame taunted me like the kids in my third-grade class after I interrupted our teacher with a sneezefart. I’d never really dated before and couldn’t imagine embarking on the task given my condition. Yes, person I hope to become intimate with, I do enjoy light anal play, however, I can no longer indulge that hole because my hemorrhoids tend to make unwelcome appearances with very little prompting. Still down for dinner and a movie?

Being American and neck-deep in student debt, taking on medical debt was par for the course, but unlike acquiring the college degrees my loans paid for, various medical charges to my credit card weren’t yielding the desired results. After the fifth doctor charged an obscene out-of-pocket amount (back on Medi-Cal, but an in-network provider cancelled my appointment with a two month wait and I started making panic moves) to misdiagnose me and push her office’s hundred-and-eighty-dollar cream for a fissure I didn’t have, I really started wondering if it was time to throw in the towel and invest in some diapers. You know, spend my imaginary money on something I could actually use.

Several months later, about a week before my half-heartedly scheduled consultation with doctor number six, something awful happened. What I can only assume was a particularly rough viral-induced flareup announced itself by firing brown liquid down my pant leg, right when I was getting cozy in bed with a book. The issue lingered for five days, causing gnarly cramps and immediate diarrhea and/or vomit every time I tried to eat. This is when the worst prolapse of my life occurred. Not only did my usual internal beast burst forth, raw and enraged, but the external situation swelled to a new level. The result: a distorted balloon animal that looked like the work of a drunk and demented party clown erupted from my sphincter.

I knew too well, as is the case with most women’s health problems, if something this visually disturbing didn’t happen right in front of a doctor for the particular thirty seconds in which they were present, it might as well have never happened. So, I wised up. I got my phone, spread my cheeks, and took a photo of that unbelievable bad boy. Thank god I did, because once the inflammation subsided, the creature retracted back up into me like a sea urchin getting poked by a stick in the hands of a toddler.

This new doctor guy spread my rectum with a scope, saw the calm hemorrhoids, and said, “They don’t look too aggravated right now, but that picture certainly tells the whole story. We need to address this so that doesn’t happen again.”

Photographic evidence, ladies! Keep those cameras ready.

He banded all of my internal hemorrhoids over three different appointments (shoutout Dr. Bazalgette, the one and only butt doctor to ever come through). Not only did he provide an actual treatment, but he spared me all of the more fiber/less fiber bullshit. He said some people “are just prone to these kinds of things,” and I was one of them. It wasn’t my fault.

Bless you, Doctor. May your funny bones be safe from hard objects and may the green lights on your drives be plentiful.

The banding fixed the prolapsing. Hallelujah! No more peekaboo when I poo. I mean, I still bleed, and my digestion is still unpredictable, but can I just celebrate for a second? Getting those naked mole rats out of my butt was a fucking rebirth. Talk about glow up of the year.

Treatment left me with a mixed bag. (Hemorrhoids aside, something is definitely wrong, but I’m tired, so whatever. I’ll take it.) Sometimes my poops are actually decent now. The stars align, and the fiber moves through, blood free. Sometimes pooping is like pushing out little rocks. Sometimes I have explosive diarrhea of untraceable origins. Once in a while, I sit with intent to poop and purely flatulate, fecal matter nowhere to be found, and just splatter the toilet red. Jackson Pollock style. So on the bright side, at least my farts have artistic potential. The number one post-banding rendition, however, is the classic fifty-fifty constipation diarrhea combo platter with side dishes of everything in between. No fomo! This sexy stud of a bowel movement proves that it really is possible to have it all.

Yes, things are finally looking up. Everyday my insides don’t fall out of my body is a win. After all the highs and lows, the anal scopes and gloved fingers, the psyllium concoctions, and the nausea, I’ve learned a lot. There’s been plenty of embarrassment, victory, and—I’d argue this cliché is justified—blood and tears. Whatever demon possesses my guts has gifted me with an irreplaceable growing experience, but honestly, I can only think of one part of me that hasn’t been changed by this wild ride. Every time I take a shit, I still resent Elizabeth.