• 2025-11-08 *

I’m not sure exactly when it was, but sometime in early 2022, I did one of the most painful poops of my life. Blood, pain when pushing, a deep lasting pain for a few hours afterwards, overall a terrible experience.

I went to the doctor’s on the first of April, 2022 to get a check up and as a fairly sprightly 32 year old man, I was not that thrilled about having to get my ass fingered by another man at least twice my age. And oh boy, was he not gentle. This was pretty peak COVID time, so thankfully we were all masked up, but I remember lying on the gurney, legs on the stirrups, and old mate just gets right in there. Funny thing was, there was an obviously new-to-the-job doctor’s assistant who was with us, and she was front and centre in for the show.

Old mate lines up my butthole and just goes straight in (thankfully with lube), at which point I glance at the assistant who herself is looking very wide-eyed at my asshole and then she promptly looks like she’s about to be sick and leaves the room very quickly. I do remember almost laughing, because she seemed to have just seem the worst thing of her life. Sorry about that.

The fun begins

Dear doctor has (re)discovered (and probably re-split) my first ever anal fissure. This would kick off an endless process (I say endless because the process has still never reached it’s endpoint, although it has evolved on its rollercoaster of pain) of most of Berlin’s butt doctors, surgery, shoving entire pharmacies of creams, ointments, and suppositories in my ass, all in the hope of subduing the myriad of less-than-ideal feelings that I get to experience daily from my behind.

After that first check up, I was prescribed a cream that mostly helped. Some real industrial shit, that was to be used daily, after pooping. It’s pretty interesting to note how quickly it becomes routine to have to explore your inner-workings multiple times daily. Until you remember that you have a massive split inside your anal passage and it burns like buggery, then it becomes not fun again.

So that worked for awhile and it did seem that I has passed this terror mostly unscathed. How young and foolish I was.

I have never been an unhealthy eater, but I’ve also never been super mindful of the food I take in in terms of macronutrients, namely fibre. Anyone who has been in a similar situation to me (and according to r/AnalFissures there are a lot of us) knows just how important this one nutrient really is.

According to my Telegram chat with my partner, in June 2023, I reportedly hurt my ass again. It must’ve been relatively ok because I don’t find many other mentions of it in our chat after that date. However, trouble was brewing...

Disaster strikes (again)

Around comes October, 2023, and since then I’ve been free as a bird, pooping wistfully from my tree branch, until two-fold disaster strikes:

I break my toe walking too fast past a door frame. That little sausage is hanging off at a 70 degree angle from the rest of my foot and the emergency nurse confirms it has both been fractured (duh) and dislocated (it was pushed back into the foot). After trying to put this back in place myself, I promptly lie down, pass out, and have a shock seizure. I wake up to Sofia screaming at me, Rahul looking whiter than me, and not feeling too good. I did manage to get a cool photo of the toe, though. 1.

A few days later, I get another fissure. It’s either the same one or a new one, either way it fucking hurts. After pooping there’s a good amount of pain that takes way too long to subside. I’m talking like 5-8 hours. I schedule an appointment with another doctor, after feeling that the last guy was way too “interactive” and also noting that they don’t exist on Doctolib (a fantastic doctor’s appointment booking app) anymore. Pretty ominous.

I get to my next appointment on crutches on November 6, 2023. We laugh about if we’re here to discuss my ass or my toe, but mostly I’m trying to get the most immediate relief humanly possible for searing pain-in-my-ass syndrome, so it’s not super easy to stay jovial. Doctor prescribes all the classic hits again and I get to work (again) on ramming stuff in my butt.

Mid-December, 2023 - it’s starting to really hurt now. I poop, and then I just prepare for about 5 hours of pain that brings me to tears. My frustration levels are through the roof, my patience is totally shot, and I remember breaking down on the floor of the bathroom one morning and I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t share this with my partner at the time, because mostly I’m a prideful fool and I’m not used to things slowing me down or hindering me in this way. It’s hard to process this and I’m very much losing control, as well as losing the ability to do anything I want to do.

I schedule more rounds with the doctor: one on the 18th and one 21st. On the 21st the doctor advises me for surgery, which we schedule for January 2nd, 2024, at 11:15. Merry Christmas and a happy new year to me. At least by now I can essentially get around by myself without crutches. Good work, little toe! At least someone knows how to heal.

Chop-chop

Getting a fissure removed surgically is pretty fascinating. It takes about 15 minutes to complete the procedure, during which the surgeon excises the offending split in the colon using a laser cutter. Very cool! I remember the nurses playing some nice music pre-surgery while I lay on the gurney, thinking they were very pretty, and then getting knocked out from the anaesthetic. A few minutes later (after what felt like an eternity), I wake up in a room next to another dude who has obviously just had the same thing happen a few minutes before me. We’re on a bit of a production line it seems.

We chat and are both relieved it’s “over”, vowing to only eat chia seeds for the rest of our lives. The good doctor comes in and tells me it’s a success and a nurse shows me what they removed. It’s a pretty sizeable chunk of my anal canal, and looks burned on the edges. They also don’t let me keep it which is kind of a bummer, so the jar with my bum gets put on another trolley that contains many jars with what seems like many bums, to be carted away for study or something. I never quite figured that part out.

It was the first week of September, 2025, and I’d just had another follow up with another doctor about my ass. The good news was my fissure has “completely gone away” which I am very thankful for. It’s just the haemorrhoids that we’re trying to get rid of now.

Since my surgery at the very start of 2024, I’ve still been on-and-off with having problems. Most notably is that it has never felt “fixed”. There’s always been a feeling of discomfort, or sometimes pain, and even more rarely, blood (not bright red, thankfully), that only subsides when I focus on my diet for days at a time.

For 99% of breakfasts since late 2023, I’ve eaten essentially the following:

• 30 grams of chia seeds/linseeds/psyllium
• 100 grams of low-fat yoghurt
• 30 grams of oats
• 50 grams of prunes
• A splash of milk

I believe that this has been one of the most influential changes in my life. Boring, yes, but transformative. It’s been a way to keep myself very regular and also reduced the amount of “push” needed to get the job done. Diet has easily become one of the quickest triggers to feeling like everything is working as expected vs everything is coming apart at the seams.

Putting it all behind me

This journey sucked and I don’t recommend it to anyone. I think there’s a fair amount of embarrassment that can come from this topic and what I learned is that there’s WAY more people out there suffering a similar fate.

Not being able to talk about it is something I discarded fairly early on, regaling my friends and colleagues regularly about my ass if asked, as this honestly felt like a relief instead of being like “yep, everything is fine” when you can barely sit on a chair.

What I learned from talking about it was that many of my immediate colleagues and friends were in similar states to what I was going through or had been in the past. Weirdly enough, we bonded quite a lot over this and I could see we were all just happy to have someone to talk to about it.

If you’re currently going through something similar right now: I’m really sorry to hear this, and it absolutely will get better, but you need to take as much care of yourself as humanly possibly. Diet needs to be perfect, water intake like crazy, no alcohol, sitzbath as much as you can, and give yourself space to heal. You got this.

If there’s one take away from this story, it’s this: eat more fibre.

#2025 #health #life