I was in Tesco last Tuesday, standing in the freezer aisle with a bag of frozen peas in one hand and my cherry vape in the other, when it hit. Not the usual period cramp that makes you want to fold in half. This was the other one. The one that starts in your guts and shoots straight down like someone just flicked a switch. I had maybe forty seconds. Forty seconds to dump the peas, abandon the trolley, and make it to the toilets at the back of the shop before I became that woman who leaves a trail.
I made it. Barely. Sat there on the lid with my jeans round my ankles, blue nails gripping the dispenser, thinking the same thing I think every single month. How is this still a secret? How have we let men, doctors, and the entire bloody NHS treat this like some embarrassing side quest instead of the monthly gut rebellion it actually is?
Because period poop is real. It is not “just hormones” in that vague way they say when they want you to shut up. It is your body doing two jobs at once and neither of them asked for permission.
Here is what actually happens, and I am going to say it without the usual medical waffle. A few days before you bleed, progesterone is high. That hormone likes to slow everything down. Your intestines get lazy. Food sits there longer. You feel bloated, bunged up, like you have swallowed a brick. Then the drop comes. Progesterone crashes and these little fat-based messengers called prostaglandins flood out. Their official job is to squeeze your uterus so it can shed the lining. Fine. But they do not stay in one place. They hit the neighbouring gut as well. The same muscles that contract in your womb start contracting in your bowels. Transit speeds up. Water does not get absorbed properly. Result? Loose, urgent, sometimes explosive trips to the loo that smell different, feel different, and arrive with zero warning.
Seventy-three percent of us get at least one of these gut symptoms around our period. Abdominal pain and diarrhoea top the list. Some get the opposite and stay constipated the whole time. Some swing between both like a pendulum from hell. If you already have IBS it gets worse. If you have endometriosis the pain when you try to go can feel like you are being stabbed from the inside. And still, when you mention it to a GP, you get the shrug. “It’s normal. Just part of being a woman.”
Normal. That word does a lot of heavy lifting. It means they do not have to look any further. It means they can send you home with a leaflet and a pat on the head. I have sat in those appointments. I have watched the doctor glance at the clock while I describe the way my stomach knots itself into a fist the night before I start. I have heard “have you tried ibuprofen?” as if I have not already eaten half a box just to get through a morning meeting. Ibuprofen can help because it blocks the enzyme that makes those prostaglandins. That is useful information. What is not useful is being told to grin and bear the rest of it.
The NHS is stretched. I know that. Waiting lists for anything gynaecological are a joke. Endometriosis can take years to diagnose because everyone assumes period pain is just what girls get. Same logic gets applied to the bowels. You mention diarrhoea on day one and they write “functional” in the notes and move on. Functional. Another word that means “we cannot be bothered.” Meanwhile women are planning their entire week around toilet access. We know which cafes have decent cubicles. We know which tube stations are safe. We carry spare pants in our bags like other people carry chargers. And we do it in silence because talking about poo is still treated like you have broken some ancient rule.
Men do not help. Most of them treat periods as “women’s business” until they want to complain about the mood swings. Ask a bloke if he has ever thought about why his girlfriend disappears to the bathroom three times before breakfast on certain days and watch him look at you like you have asked him to explain quantum physics. They joke about “that time of the month” but they never mean the part where you are crouched over a public toilet praying the lock holds. They never mean the part where you cancel plans because you cannot trust your own body not to betray you in the middle of a pub. Patriarchy loves a tidy story. Woman bleeds, woman is emotional, woman takes a paracetamol. The messy middle bit, the bit where your guts revolt and you feel like you have been hollowed out, that bit gets left off the script.
I remember one month I had a deadline for a piece that needed to go out that evening. I was at my kitchen table in Hackney, laptop open, oat-milk flat white going cold, when the first wave hit. I lasted twenty minutes before I had to slam the lid and sprint. Came back, tried again. Same thing. By the third time I was crying with frustration, not pain. Just the sheer pointlessness of it. My body had decided that today I was not allowed to work. No one at the outlet would have understood if I had said “sorry, period poop.” They would have thought I was being dramatic. So I stayed up until three in the morning finishing it after the worst had passed, vape in one hand, feeling like I had run a marathon I never signed up for.
It is not just the physical. It is the mental load. You start tracking not just your bleed but your bowels. You notice the pattern. Day minus two, a bit sluggish. Day one, the floodgates. Day two, still not right. You adjust what you eat, what you drink, how far you walk from home. You become an amateur scientist of your own digestive tract because the actual scientists have not been funded to care enough. Research into menstrual health has always lagged. Money goes to the conditions that affect men too, or the ones that sound more serious on a grant application. Period poop does not make the cut. It is too ordinary, too embarrassing, too female.
And yet it is not ordinary when you are living it. It is the reason some of us dread the first two days more than the cramps themselves. It is the reason we side-eye every public toilet and calculate risk like we are planning a military operation. It is the reason a simple Tesco run can turn into a race against your own insides.
I am tired of the pretence. Tired of the articles that mention it in passing then move on to something prettier. Tired of the doctors who nod and say it will pass. Tired of the men who change the subject the second it gets real. This is not a quirky little fact to giggle about over wine. This is a monthly reminder that our bodies are still treated as inconvenient rather than complex. That half the population can have their guts hijacked by the same chemicals that run their reproductive system and the response is a shrug.
There are things that take the edge off. Heat on the stomach. Staying hydrated even when you do not want to. Gentle movement if you can manage it. Some women swear by certain teas or cutting dairy that week. Ibuprofen early, before the prostaglandins peak. Tracking so you at least know it is coming. None of it is a cure. None of it should have to be the whole solution.
What would actually help is being believed the first time we mention it. Shorter waits for anyone whose symptoms are severe. More research that does not treat the menstrual cycle as an afterthought. Education that starts in schools so the next generation of girls do not grow up thinking they are the only ones whose stomachs turn traitor every four weeks. And maybe, just maybe, a culture that does not make us feel like we have to whisper about our own bowels.
I finished that Tesco shop eventually. Bought the peas, bought the emergency chocolate, walked home with my vape clouding the pavement. By the time I got in I was drained, the kind of tired that sits behind your eyes. I made another flat white, sat on the sofa with my feet up, and thought about all the women doing the exact same calculation right now. The ones at work, the ones on the train, the ones pretending everything is fine while their body stages a protest.
We have been polite about this for too long. We have laughed it off, hidden it, called it normal because that was easier than demanding better. I am done being polite. Period poop is real. It is common. It is disruptive. And the fact that we still have to explain it, justify it, and suffer it in private is not a quirk of biology. It is a choice the system keeps making. Time we stopped letting them.