Day: 11 January 2026

Big

After a bit of a grim night with IBS and wrecked sleep on a slow Sunday afternoon my wife and I sat down and BIg was on the telly. We’re about four years apart in age, not a big deal at our age but I suppose when it comes to a film I last watched start to finish in 1988 when I was 18 and my wife 14 (we wouldn’t meet until 1995 so don’t panic) it’s interesting when we share a thing we both enjoyed from the 80s.

Anyway, really enjoyed Big. I remember it being a fun story about a kid becoming an adult but I don’t remember the very obvious symbolism about not wishing your childhood away which is so clearly in the premise but then also deftly delivered in the film too.

It’s a story that knows exactly what its theme is and then it plays out at every level, between Hank’s Josh wishing to be an adult and getting “big” but still being a kid, and then losing that young side of him because he’s enjoying the trapping of adulthood, to Elizabeth Perkin’s Susan who has Embraced adulthood and all its horribleness and hanks character brings out the innocence in her. A sort of near mirror of each others stories. Great writing.

Also after binge watching stranger things it’s fun to see an actual Magical film about kids made in the 80s. It was lot more omnipresent and pastel looking with shades of grey rather than the bolder colours on display in stranger things. Over on Reddit, amusingly, someone asked “did kids really run around totally unsupervised during the 80s” my friend you don’t know the half of it. Anyway great film. Lovely watch.

IBS and me…

About 10 (maybe 15 years ago) I started getting excruciating pains in my stomach. I mean end of the world, apocalyptic, doubled over in agony crying, wishing I was dead pains. They would start in the evening and typically go on until the next morning. They’d have a sort of journey, from “oh I can feel something a bit odd” to “oh-this is sore” to “please god let me die” to eventually “on this is agony but actually I might have peaked”. I saw the doc, I went to a&e (where the now typical 14 hour wait meant that by the time I was seen the pain had crescendoed).

The doc put me on a fodmap diet (fodmap puts your food intake into food groups which are known to cause problems and you slowly start reintroducing them back in to your diet). Once I’d done that it was obvious that gluten was BAD.

I suspect this wasn’t entirely out of the blue for me, as I’d been effected by the same “oh that feels a bit odds” mostly after drinking beer. A discomfort that was noticeable enough that actually it’s probably a large contributor to why I’m not really a drinker.

eventually, after a few years of back and forth and testing etc, I was diagnosed with IBS-D (Irritable Bowel Syndrome – D for … well, you can guess) with a “wheat trigger”. Ibs if you don’t know is a special doctors code for “well we did all the tests we could for this issue, and you didn’t have any of those things, so you have IBS” – IBS might as well be called IDK.

So, I went off gluten (though like a brave little soldier I will occasionally have things with barley or rye in them which do contain gluten and they seem to be fine). I went off gluten because it’s easier to ask for gluten free than wheat free (and even asking for gluten free is a pain).

Going gluten free has helped. The end-of-the-world pain has largely been put back in its box, and those extreme pain attacks are few and far between. That said, they haven’t gone away and lately the attacks have been – if not as painful – certainly more frequent.

I suspect it’s because a “wheat” trigger doesn’t mean only wheat will trigger an attack. I’m beginning to suspect suger (oh my first and truest love) of also starting to trigger it.

I could stand to lose some weight, that’s for sure. So I think I’m going to cut sugar out, or at least as best as I can, there’s plenty of suger in prepackaged foods, but I’m going to give sugar treats a wide berth. I’ve lost bread, and I’ve stopped milk (well drinking milk, I’ve not gone vegan)

I’m happy to hear your thoughts on this, but I’ve heard every possible idea and I’ve visited the IBS Reddit threads where it is just other peopel talking about the pain, there’s no absolute solution to this (maybe… maybe faecal implant…?) and I’m not looking any sympathy. Just getting some 6am blogging in since I’m sitting here with a hot water bottle on my tummy due to the pain.

thank god I don’t have a day job, eh.