Yes. This is one of the rare times I have ever imagined myself saying, “Let's hope it's poop.” But I do hope it is that and not an obstruction of some other kind. Anyway, this matter needs to be taken care of and then prevented from happening again.
If it's poop (feces, stool), and you say you have a history of constipation, it sounds like you might have a fecal impaction. This happens when your poop is hard and it accumulates. It sometimes bulges internally, not only out of its normal place in the great scheme of things, but encroaching into other surrounding territory. It bulges out and flattens out, and it cannot get out the anal opening. It just keeps stacking up. Maybe it wasn't even that hard originally, but you didn't respond by going to the bathroom when your body told you to, so it has just gotten drier and harder.
Sometimes people who are on opioids or have gastrointestinal problems that reduce the frequency of their bowel movements will end up having to go to the doctor for a painful fecal impaction to be removed by a medical professional, who is wearing a glove. To put it bluntly, they “dig you out.” Usually once they get a couple of pieces of the obstructing poop broken off and easing out through the anal opening, the intestinal muscles will contract and start pushing the rest out, until the whole burden is shifted and eliminated. Then the doctor may flush the tract out with something like saline solution in an enema bottle and check the area with a proctoscope to make sure there are no abrasions, tears or other kinds of tissue damage. This is not something you should try to do to yourself, even if you can reach, or have an untrained person try to do either, no matter how much they love and sympathize with you, because the possibility of poking through that tissue is just too great. That is your intestine and gut you are talking about, and it is loaded with infection potential. You could also bleed severely as a consequence of being ruptured. You could also damage your anal sphincter by stretching it.
In the doctor's office or urgent care, depending on how big and bad it is and how hardened, they may give you a mild sedative or apply a topical anesthetic to numb the area and then use a little spoon to scoop out enough to get it started moving out the opening. If you do not get it reoved, it is only going to keep stacking up and backing up into your intestinal tract, meanwhile getting more and more decomposed on the other end (in your stomach), and you could get a seriously septic or toxic situation. You would also be very painful because of the cramping and bloating, your body's repeated efforts to keep pushing it out when it is no longer able to be moved by those muscles, because it is hard as a rock and the muscles are also out of shape. People in this situation on a good day can develop hemorrhoids including bleeding hemorrhoids, and on a worse day may end up with a rectal prolapse or loss of sphincteric control. There is even a medical condition called toxic megacolon, which is what it sounds like. Over time, the colon becomes deformed, and so much stool fills it, it’s basically like having a big misshapen potato where mashed potatoes should be, taking up too much room in the belly, and it’s toxic.
In the present immediate situation, the blockage needs to be removed. If it is still pretty small, and you can feel a bulge in your perineum (the thin tissue between your genitalia and your anus), you may be able to do a careful workaround by taking a couple of mineral oil or saline enemas and strategically inserting them, one after the other, then being patient and hoping that the process of inserting the enema tip, as well as delivering the fluid contained inside the enema, will break up the blockage and get it started on its way, in a few pieces. But it may be too big, and the perineal tissue is thin. It is not like the strong tissue on other parts of your body, and you should not apply too much pressure to it. It can split. You should not poke around or prod with the enema nozzle.
If I were in your situation, where it hasnreached the point that you are having trouble sitting without discomfort, I would not even try the enema. I would just say this is literally too big a job for me, and I would go to the ER or urgent care. They can safely clear it the obstruction. You will feel better almost immediately, and they can do it without leaving you with any other problems to deal with.
To prevent this from happening again, you need to introduce more fiber like vegetables and more liquids into your diet, eat fewer things that cause hard stools and more things that cause soft stools, stay hydrated, try to have a bowel movement at least once a day, and do not hurry: dedicate time for it in your morning routine, because everybody's bowels don't immediately kick into gear the minute they sit down on the toilet.
You might be one of the many people who benefit from taking a fiber supplement that is based on cellulose, like Metamucil or Miralax, just to make your stools bulky. You can stir it into your coffee. Even though they will be bulky, they will not be solid rock like what you are dealing with now. They will signal to your intestine that it is time to go, before you end up with a blockage. You should then go to the bathroom, not just remember that you need to take a bathroom break this afternoon. Listen to your body. You can be proactive this way, in addition to improving your diet by eating good fibrous foods and avoiding constipating foods like dairy products and cheese. Some people cannot even look at cheese without getting constipated. You can also take oral probiotics and eat yogurt or drink kefir to improve your gut health by multiplying your millions of good beneficial intestinal bacteria. All of this will help your food get broken down and used to its best potential. And then, whatever you don't need or cannot process for nutrition, your body will get rid of like a cruise ship blowing its garbage out the back of the boat. It shouldn't just sit around in your colon and turn sour, nor should it be so acidic and out of balance that the GI tract can't wait to get rid of it in solid form and ejects it spasmodically as soon as there is enough fluid to move it out as diarrhea.
If you start producing routinely medium, formed, and comfortable stools or poop, your whole body will feel better overall as a result. You will also know what is normal for you. Poop is not poisonous or something to be afraid of, but it doesn't help you either, so when you have it, you need to give it up and get it out of there, just like washing something dirty off your skin. It's not doing you any good. That is why we refer to so many things we don't think have any value as being “shit” or “crap,” or whatever scatological-derogatory combo conveys how worthless you think it is. It is also why it smells bad, because it is dead, it was once alive, it is decomp, and nobody wants to be around it because it is unpleasant. Just like a lot of poisonous plants are colored red by nature to instinctively tell birds and animals these red things are not good for them to eat, or foul-smelling things will make them sick. Nature is wicked smaht.
If you are a sedentary person by nature or have to be because of your job, this is all the more reason why you may end up having problems with your bowel movements because that area of your body just does not get enough exercise or stimulation and the muscles don't stretch or get a workout. Sedentary means sitting, but not just at a desk in an office. A truck driver or an Uberer has a sedentary job. So is a retired who is glued to their Lazy Boy. The same goes for people in wheelchairs or who are bedbound.
Among the old folk remedies, prune juice as a laxative is the top dog. Also there used to be something people called a “Cuban enema” which was a cup of strong, hot black coffee followed by a shot of prune juice (taken by mouth!); I don't know why it was supposedly Cuban. There are enemas made of cold coffee too; that is really old-time, but I imagine the caffeine is the idea. Until we got more enlightened about lung cancer (or died if it), many smokers planned their morning bowel movement to coincide with their first cigarette of the day because the nicotine jolted the GI tract into action. Smokers who were quitting would complain bitterly that they were never going to be able to have a BM again. None of this is recommended for you, OP. You are not a person with problems of irregularity. You are a person who feels extremely constipated. If your stool is too built up to get out the back door, you are past that point where folk remedies would help, and you should not try them.
Patients taking opioid medication are notorious for having severe, chronic constipation because their GI tract is not as attenuated, or awake and responsive, as it should be because of the way narcotics work. In addition, these people may not eat enough or eat right, and if they do produce enough stool for a BM, it is unlikely to happen regularly and it is likely to feel incomplete. There is a new prescription medicine, ReliStor (methylnaltrexone bromide), that these people may be recommended. You may recognize the “naltrexone” part from other opioid-related meds like Narcan or naloxone. Besides not being a doctor, I am also not a pharmacist, so I don't know ReliStor’s mechanism of action. I know it exists because of myvlnexperience working with pain management doctors who have patients on chronic opioid therapy and who are always constipated, sometimes impacted. If you think this medicine would help, you should discuss it with your doctor. You should not take it without discussing it because more medicines than many people realize have an effect of reversing the opioids in board and can cause an opioid-dependent person to go into withdrawals, which is yet another life-threatening situation.
People of means who go to a health spa sometimes undergo a procedure called a “high colonic,” which is essentially having someone who is trained to wash out their lower GI tract, going higher up than an enema does, maybe to clean up their act because they eat a lot of rich foods or as part of their overall detox and rejuvenation. The 1950s comic and rebel Lenny Bruce, who was a heroin addict, was famously vocal about his love for high colonics. He was dependent on them. Some practitioners of alternative, holistic and New Age medicine (that is, non-standard Western World) used to include high colonics for their patients, but I don't think they are as popular as they once were, and I have never had one myself. There used to be storefront operations advertising massage and high colonics the way you see tattoo parlors now, but they were unregulated. You be the judge.
Bedbound cancer patients and wheelchair-using patients have an extra tough time because almost everything about their lifestyle limitations is pointing them toward constipation and fecal impaction. Those conditions are already disabling and often extremely painful from other related problems like impaired movement and decubitus ulcers (pressure sores). Painful or impaired defecation seems really unfair.
Women in particular, even healthy women, may end up with bowel impactions because the pelvic floor has been weakened through childbirth, and the territory between the vaginal opening and the anal opening has been under pressure so it is not just a “straight shoot.” They also may be too busy as caregivers to take the time to have a BM when their body signals them it's time. Anybody with this kind of extra pressure may also have hemorrhoids and not know it.
Women also can end up with more bladder infections, not just because of vaginal intercourse introducing contaminants in the area of the urethra, but because unexpelled stool will tend to encroach on the urinary “pathway.” This is why after a woman has a BM, she may suddenly be surprised by a big gush of urine, as a result of her bladder being incompletely emptied until the dam in the rectum broke. Wiping after a bowel movement can also drag poop toward the urinary tract if the woman wipes in the wrong direction. Little girls need to learn the proper technique from a very early age.
I strongly advise against taking laxatives of any kind for your current obstruction unless you are told to by a doctor, because laxatives usually work as stimulants. They cause your GI tract muscles to push harder to propel the stool out of your body, faster than natural, and maybe give these smooth muscles a boost if you have been trying too long and getting nowhere and are tired, like a woman in labor whose uterus is exhausted. If an obstruction is too big, the laxatives are just going to be telling the body to push harder on a still-immovable object, and you are going to get cramping and it will hurt even more. You could ask the pharmacist to recommend a stool softener, like Dulcolax, but in your case, OP, this is sort of like closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out. In the future it might be a good idea. If you know you are the type of person who is going to have extra hard or large stools, maybe because you consume mass quantities or what you eat is nut very nutritious so there is a lot of waste in your waste, you can get into the habit of taking stool softeners, once this problem is over with.
Many women start taking stool softeners when they are pregnant and their whole abdominal and pelvic anatomy is temporarily being rearranged to accommodate what is happening with their uterus. The last thing they want to have to do is strain to move their bowels. For one thing, it raises their blood pressure, which is already likely higher due to pregnancy. For another thing, they are probably moving more awkwardly, hungrier, “eating for two” and pooping for two.
Lying in a warm (not hot) bath and relaxing, maybe with a cup of senna tea to drink and to rest your muscles inside and out, and try to get your mind off it, would be my recommendation, and then you would be conveniently clean and ready to go to the doctor or ER or urgent care. If you have Epsom salts, throw a handful in your bathwater for your body. (Epsom salts are good to keep in the house for almost as many reasons as baking soda is.) Epsom salts are also useful as a laxative, but not for you, OP, at this time.
The other reason i alluded to briefly at the beginning was that it might not be a backup or blockage of poop, but from non-poop. You might have gas and think it means a lump of stool is stuck, when you could have a problem like a growth you don't know about that is now big enough to stop traffic. You could have something like a tumor, hopefully benign, or displaced tissue intruding from somewhere nearby that has gotten out of whack. If you have anal sex, you might have left something behind. You can't figure this out by yourself and you definitely cannot remove it, so again, this is all the more reason you're just going to have to bite the bullet and go to the doctor.
It also might not be pain/pressure due to poop or a growth, but something like appendicitis, diverticular disease (where there are little pockets lining the intestine, and something as small as a seed can get trapped in one and fester), an ulcer (which is a sore), gas, or, if you are female, menstrual cramps, endometriosis, ovulatory pain (“mittelschmerz”), an early intrauterine pregnancy, or an ectopic. It also could be musculoskeletal in origin, like something out of alignment in your spine which may be causing you to position yourself in a pain-producing way (like favoring your coccyx or tailbone). It may be helpful in the future to sit on a cushion called a “donut,” which is inflatable and beloved by many people with hemorrhoids, not only sedentary office workers but long-haul truckers, and of course frail or disabled people, including nursing home residents in wheelchairs who need help turning and have limited mobility. You can get one at the drugstore.
Your abdominal and pelvic cavities are two separate “bowls” in your lower torso, separated by the peritoneum. They have a lot more in there besides what you need to digest and excrete. And by the way, “A river runs through it,” all of that area, in the form of great vessels of the circulatory system like the abdominal aorta, the arteries and veins that keep your limbs alive and communicate directly with the heart. They are all in there, more in the belly than the chest as we usually think of when considering our body’s vulnerable areas. If blood flow is reduced or structures are rearranged, you will feel belly pain.
Once this situation has been handled, OP, and you have implemented the dietary and other lifestyle changes that will hopefully reduce the odds of it happening again, you probably will be advised to have a proctoscopy or colonoscopy, or some form of endoscopy, going from the bottom to as high up, or starting from the top and going down as far as they think they should look. It will be done with sedation and light, brief anesthesia, especially if the doctor takes a couple of tissue biopsies. I have worked for doctors who would do it without anesthesia at the patient's request, but it was a judgment call, and typically the patient did okay, but also the doctor sometimes was reluctant to take biopsies when the patient was not under anesthesia. The anesthesia and the procedure are no big deal, and a screening colonoscopy is recommended anyway after the age of about 45 or for younger people with risk factors including family history. This will depend on your doctor’s judgment and your medical status.
I am not a doctor. I do not present any of this as expert medical advice. But this is also not made up or an old wives’ tale. Don't postpone treatment because you are embarrassed because it is about poop. What goes in must come out, one way or the other, in everyone. It is important for it to come out safely. Drink clear liquids, like Gatorade and tea, more than usual right now, OP, but don't go overboard and end up with a belly ache from too much fluids. Everybody eats, and as a result everybody poops. And they feel better for doing it. May the force be with you (the life force).
“YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”
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Note: I realize that this is really long, but I thought, since this is a topic people can be reluctant to discuss (at least seriously), and it is important, as long as the subject had already been broached and we were here, I would go for it and try to be thorough.
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