A Constipated Client Who Couldn’t Let Go
When unresolved grief is an obstacle to progress
Like the first page of a good novel, Dylan’s lead-in as to why he was in my office captivated me from the start.
He had just been released from the hospital the week before.
After 30 days of increasing abdominal discomfort, Dylan had checked himself into Emergency.
He hadn’t had a bowel movement for an entire month!
Doctors ran some tests to check for obstruction or perforation. Nurses cleared him out with laxatives, enemas, and stool softeners.
“Apparently there’s nothing wrong with me”, he said with a shrug.
Upon being discharged, Dylan asked his nurse what he could do to prevent the scenario from happening all over again.
“Eat more fibre”, she suggested.
Dylan came home and did exactly that. He made smoothies filled with fruits and vegetables which he drank daily for a week.
This resulted in ONE bowel movement since he returned from the hospital.
And that’s why Dylan had made an appointment with me.
I would have thought he’d have made more progress with the smoothie routine until I had a look at his food diary.
No breakfast.
No lunch.
Dylan was only ‘eating’ once daily, after he got home from his desk job at the bank. He routinely skipped lunch, choosing to see clients through lunch hour, as this was a convenient time for them.
His dinner consisted of his smoothie and two baked chicken breasts or salmon filets, meaning he was getting all of his daily nutrition at once.
That was problem number one - - or should I say, “number 2”.
I explained to Dylan that the digestive system can be overwhelmed by a large meal, that digestion could be compromised if the amount of digestive juices and enzymes available were insufficient for tackling the volume of food eaten. This made sense to him, as he did experience occasional episodes of heart burn.
I also explained that the intestinal tract is stimulated to move when food is chewed and swallowed. I suggested to Dylan that the fact he was only eating only once daily meant this process was being initiated just once daily.
Upon reviewing his lifestyle, I learned that Dylan was sitting at a desk most of the day, in face-to-face customer consultations (which I could relate to!). Did he ever have urges to go to the bathroom? I asked. He did, but it wasn’t usually convenient to go, he explained. I suggested that his sedentary job, together with ignoring ‘nature’s call’ was compounding the problem.
The next important factor I uncovered while inquiring about Dylan’s stress levels.
Dylan was a 34-year-old bank employee who enjoyed the interactions he conducted with banking clients, and seemed to get a real ‘buzz’ out of his job. So he didn’t seem too concerned that this was still demanding on his nervous system.
The fourth factor I uncovered really hit the nail on the head.
I asked Dylan why he waited until he was in physical pain before he sought medical help for his constipation. “I guess I was scared they would find, you know, cancer.” And that’s when he revealed that his best friend had passed away from cancer the year before.
Even though his death was expected, Dylan missed him terribly, and had difficulty imagining and recreating his life without him.
Yes, he had a couple of appointments with a grief counselor, he said. But that was it.
I suggested that Dylan had not fully mourned the loss of his friend. He agreed with me.
The large intestine is how we release what is not needed by the body. Was Dylan’s physical body manifesting the emotional difficulty of letting go of his friend?
I don’t know for sure, but that day I made 3 recommendations within my wheelhouse to help Dylan get things moving:
I suggested he resume seeing the grief counselor regularly.
I recommended he begin eating twice daily, with the eventual goal of eating 3 meals daily, to help stimulate peristalsis - - movement of the intestines.
I gave him a magnesium bowel tolerance protocol. He was to take 1 capsule of magnesium glycinate (165 mg) every hour until his bowels moved. (There was a hidden benefit to this: an increase in hydration every time Dylan filled a glass of water to swallow the capsules!).
Dylan soon reported that his ‘magic number’ derived from this experiment was six, so I encouraged him to stick to that number and take 2 capsules of magnesium three times daily.
Dylan arrived at our follow up one week later with a big smile on his face. He was now pooping DAILY!
Those of us who are ‘daily eliminators’ may find this funny, but for Dylan it was life-changing. He felt lighter, less bloated, more relaxed and was sleeping better, too.
While the high-dose magnesium supplementation may be viewed by some as the crutch instead of getting to the root of Dylan’s chronic constipation problems, it wasn’t without benefits. As an essential, commonly deficient mineral, it was supporting Dylan’s muscle and nerve function and a myriad of other body functions.
One can’t say that about the remedial laxatives they gave him at the hospital.
With this newfound physical sense of relief and renewal, Dylan was well-positioned to make even more improvements to his whole self. His goal was no longer to ‘stay away from the hospital’, but to develop a nutrition and lifestyle routine he could stick to that would produce some regularity in his bowel movements. Dylan still has a ways to go in ‘normalizing’ his eating routine (not to mention increasing his hydration), but his confidence gave me the confidence that he was going to be OK.