Dr. Laurent Health Corner

Hemorrhoids Are Collagen Failure?

Please STOP trying to fix your haemorrhoids. I know that sounds crazy, but every time you apply the cream, run a bath, or follow your doctor's advice to the letter, you might be treating an irritation that settled months ago while the real damage goes completely untouched. My name is Rosalind. I've been a colorectal nurse practitioner for over 20 years. And what I'm about to tell you is something most of my colleagues won't say out loud. The standard advice we give works, for a lot of people, for the first few weeks. But for those still dealing with this a year later, following that same advice to the letter might actually be part of why they're not getting better. I want to tell you about a patient of mine. I'll call her Marguerite. She came to me three years in. Before this, she'd been a woman who did things. Choir on Wednesdays. Volunteering at the food bank on Saturday mornings, on her feet and then sitting on a folding chair sorting donations. She and her husband had a trip planned. Nine days in the Canadian Rockies with twenty other couples. Something they'd been talking about ever since he retired. She had a whole list. Banff. Lake Louise. The train through the mountains with the glass roof. By the time she sat down across from me, all of it was on hold indefinitely. She'd stopped going to choir because choir meant ninety minutes on a stacking chair. The four hours she used to spend at the food bank had become the one hour she could manage. The trip had been quietly shelved. She couldn't picture nine days of coach seats and restaurant chairs, or six hours sitting on a train to see the very thing they'd travelled all that way for. And she didn't know how to tell her husband she wasn't sure she'd ever be ready. She told me she'd started dreading mornings. Not because of the pain exactly, although the pain was real. It was the moment she woke up and had to negotiate with herself about how the day was going to go. What she'd wear. Where she'd sit. Whether she'd say yes to anything. She said something I've heard in different forms from so many patients: "I feel like I've become a small person. And I know how that sounds. But I don't know who I am if I'm the woman who says no to everything." She wasn't being dramatic. I've sat across from enough people in that chair to know the difference. What this does to someone's sense of self, quietly, over years, almost never comes up during a clinical appointment. There isn't time. And there isn't a box for it. The cancelled plans. The guilt of being the reason a holiday didn't happen. The very specific grief of watching your husband move through an entire day without once thinking about whether a chair will hurt. Marguerite had stopped accepting invitations. Not because she wanted to stay at home. Because explaining why she couldn't come had become exhausting. People meant well. But after the fourth or fifth time somebody said, "Have you tried more fibre?" she simply stopped bringing it up. She'd tried everything they suggested. Fibre. Powder and capsules. Sitz baths twice every evening for eight months. Around £125 a year on creams, which she'd actually worked out for me on a piece of paper. A banding procedure that held for eleven months. She'd done all of it without missing a day. And she sat there telling me none of it had made a lasting difference. I hear versions of this story constantly. From the woman who cancelled the cruise she'd booked for her 40th wedding anniversary. From the man who'd spent thirty years driving for work and was now anxious about a two-hour journey to visit his son. From the patient who stopped going to church because the pews were wooden and the service lasted an hour. Different lives. Same story.