by Roger Smith

Lisa (not her real name) wishes she’d never gotten hemorrhoids. But having them proved who her real friends are.

“The pain was excruciating,” said Lisa, referring to the worst of her bouts with hemorrhoids. “It was throbbing. I felt like somebody was stabbing me.”

Hemorrhoids usually aren’t deadly. In most cases, symptoms go away within a few days. But some of Lisa’s relapses since she first experienced hemorrhoids in 1998 have been agonizing.

A few months ago, she felt horrible itching and burning and lay on her office floor, unable to move. She called desperately for help.

She cries with joy thinking of her coworkers’ kindness. They ran to a pharmacy to get the witch hazel pads that brought relief.

Half the population gets a hemorrhoid by age 50, said Dr. Angela McGee, gastroenterologist at Kelsey-Seybold Clinic.

When a person has hemorrhoids, the veins around the anus or lower rectum are swollen, inflamed and protruding.

Excessive straining during a bowel movement, heavy lifting, pregnancy, constipation or diarrhea, excessive standing, lack of exercise or anal intercourse can cause a flareup. Rubbing or cleaning too vigorously around the anus may also trigger irritation with bleeding or itching.

A thrombosed external hemorrhoid is either painful swelling or a hard lump around the anus that sometimes results after a blood clot forms.

Can hemorrhoids be prevented?
“Most of the time, hemorrhoids can be prevented,” McGee said. “Most important is keeping bowel habits regular with a high fiber diet and maybe adding some bulk-forming agents, cilium products you can purchase without a prescription. That can control symptoms very easily.”

Warm baths with Epsom salts, ice packs, petroleum jelly, witch hazel pads and prescription ointment can relieve the itching, pain and swelling of hemorrhoids.

One employee recommends a home remedy: Sitting in an empty bathtub directly on a cloth diaper saturated with an antiseptic such as Listerine.

McGee had not heard of that. “When those measures don’t work, an alternative is surgery,” McGee said.

Many hemorrhoid surgeries are the same now, simply cutting them out, as when Andrew Watson had his in the early 1960s. But in the last two years, U.S. doctors began using a new procedure developed in Europe, the stapled hemmorrhoidectomy.

“Both surgeries are painful,” said Dr. Reggie Vaden, Kelsey-Seybold surgeon. Although the stapled surgery hurts less, they carry the same risks.

“I advise against surgery if you can manage your condition conservatively with diet and nonprescription suppositories,” McGee said.

“I worked irregular hours and traveled a lot,” Watson remembers. “There was heavy lifting, booze, cigarettes and an irregular diet.

“I itched before I bled. I didn’t get concerned until the bleeding.”

Watson’s doctor told him he needed surgery or he would become anemic from the steady dripping of blood.

A hemorrhoidectomy solved Watson’s problem. He hasn’t had hemorrhoids in four decades. Yet, he remembers the awful recovery process as if it were last week.

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