At different stages throughout my life I experienced the displeasure and embarrassment of hemorrhoids.
As a young teenager I had them appear believing at the time that they were a result of not using the school restrooms (because I thought they were disgusting) in favor of waiting until I got home. I quickly got over any fear of public restrooms after undergoing surgery to have hemorrhoids removed at the age 11 or 12.
When I was 18, I had two or three show up after I went off to college…had no idea why because I was well over my fear of public restrooms. I tried using the “H” medicine with no success and they became extremely inflamed and finally burst on a catamaran outing which was a bloody and embarrassing mess.
As a young adult working in construction, running equipment and driving dump trucks, I would get them from time to time and just lived with them.
When I was in my early forties…I got them so bad that I took a week off from work and eventually went to immediate care where they “lanced” them. I then had to get checked for polyps and prostate issues as a precaution. The hemorrhoids returned within just a couple of days after being “lanced” and I decided that they were there to stay and made friends with them.
My dad who also suffered from hemorrhoids told me about using a stretched out cotton ball stuffed in the crack to prevent friction from butt cheek movement. This made my seemingly old “friends” seem more tolerable.
The daily routine of using the cotton balls lasted for a couple of years until a 14 hour long car ride to visit family and attend a wedding where they re-inflamed with a vengeance. The return trip was really uncomfortable. This happened a couple of years after I started making positive changes in my habits. On a separate note, I had been using an app on my phone called “My Fitness Pal” to track my eating habits.
Shortly after the trip with the inflamed roids, I noticed on the app that I lacked the recommended amount of potassium in my diet and began searching on Google for foods that were high in potassium. One of the things that I found was wheatgrass. I purchased some wheatgrass powder and started adding it to the vegetable and protein powder smoothies that I was drinking daily. Within a week, my hemorrhoids were almost gone! A week after that, they were completely gone.
I don’t think it was necessarily the potassium that made the hemorrhoids go away but I believe the wheatgrass powder along with some of the exercises that I had been doing had a role in their disappearance. I wasn’t even looking to cure the roids at this point (I had given up on it) but only seeking to improve my overall health led to this serendipitous event.