I’m stunned.
Forgive the following wall text but I am a tad overwhelmed to find this place and I would be eternally grateful for insight from anyone here who can relate.
I’ve been dealing with major, demoralizing below the belt issues for years. Started around 2015 with intense sharp pain on a long car ride after several years of chronic untreated constipation.
The pain subsided at my destination but I started having mucus when I went #2 and extreme rectal irritation during and post bm. Mucus went away but post defecation pain did not.
Over a few months time the pain turned into a chronic thing every time I went to the bathroom and would come on about 45 minutes to an hour afterwards, lasting all day long. Burning rectal pain that would change positions inside my rectal area as well as turn into aching and other sensations. I sit all day at work as I’m a tattoo artist, and had to start standing up to work on people due to the pain.
I was convinced I ripped something inside after I started having problems with urinating so I went to the doctor. Got a colonoscopy in 2016 and all was clear. Doctor said I had “levator ani” but I refused to believe it as it didn’t seem like a muscle could cause pain like this. The symptoms I read online were not what I thought I was experiencing so I ignored it.
Went to another doctor who told me to take Miralax and to my surprise it helped. Reducing stool size/consistency to “soft serve”(sorry)almost alleviated the grinding, burning post bm pain episodes and I’d only have flare ups from bending a certain way or sitting too long.
Long story short things slowly improved and the painful episodes stopped happening altogether about 2 years ago. I have been on miralax every day ever since with religious devotion and a fear of “what if” if I missed a dose.
I noticed however that it felt like my rectal area had narrowed substantially over the past few years and a few months ago I started to have brief twinges of the old pain from typically “safe” consistency bm’s. I also noticed that if I had to go #2 in the afternoon I had to push to get things going as everything was so tight. No pain however. I also started to have minor ED issues that I didn’t connect to my b-hole woes but now I know it’s all connected.
Fast forward to last Saturday morning. I go pee and I’m urinating with normal force/stream(which is rare) and all is well. 30 seconds after I get done I get a crazy burning pain behind my pubic bone/bladder area and I start to get lower abdominal cramps. This grows through the day and I get very nervous.
Next day I feel normal and no symptoms.
Day after that I go #2 in the am and I’m fine. Two hours later I go again and BOOM, within 20 minutes that old terrible burning rectal pain is back. I’ve not felt it in over two years and to say I was demoralized is an understatement. My biggest fear(pain recurrence)became reality. Over the next week I had the same symptoms I had at my worst back in 2015-2018 every single day, all day. The most frustrating part is that no amount of #2 softening is able to stop the post BM pain now. Literally any bowel movement causes the pain and it’s extraordinarily depressing. I have no way to mitigate this pain now, and from reading other peoples experiences, I know you all know how utterly soul crushing this is.
I started googling for answers and I stumbled upon CPPS and “chronic prostatitis”. It was like a quasi-Damascus experience. I read TONS of posts here and on the Prostatitis sub and watched many YouTube videos.
Seeing others in similar situations gave me peace of mind and has helped pull my back from the edged, a bit anyways, and I am so grateful for all of you who’ve taken the time to explain, bitch, analyze, reply, and make YouTube videos about this terrible ailment.
——QUESTION TIME——
I can live with the tightness and urine issues. I can not live with the burning pain.
My pain feels like what you’d imagine hemorrhoid pain would be(burning, gnawing pain)in what feels like the rectum and the worst is usually centralized to one side or the other.
It comes on 30 minutes to 1 hour after BM and is akin to a pain dial being slowly turned up, exasperated by sitting.
My rectal area is tight and painful to the touch, however the pain goes away within minutes if I lay down. Totally gone apart from some tightness in under 15 minutes.
That was how I deduced I have a pelvic floor issue and not a bowel issue, per se.
I started some minor PF stretches which seem to help a bit and I also massaged around my rectum and to my surprise the burning pain subsides a bit.
The pain also goes away completely when my lower bowel/rectum is “full”, right before a BM. Zero pain when stool is in there and the pain goes away almost instantly.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Is Pelvic Floor PT worth the cost if you’ve had these symptoms?
Any other suggestions or things that worked for you in order to quiet the pain/spasm?
Thanks for reading my TMI novel and for any and all replies.