Four years of hemorrhoids, and the boring fix that finally worked

I'm not a doctor. I'm just a guy who spent four years dealing with hemorrhoids and an anal fissure, made almost every mistake you can make, and eventually found something simple that worked for me. This is that story, the embarrassing parts included.

2020: where it started

It started during COVID, like a lot of bad habits did. Locked inside, moving less, eating worse, and slowly getting constipated without really noticing. At first it was just discomfort. Then one day, going to the bathroom hurt. Really hurt.

That was the constipation turning into something else: hemorrhoids, and later an anal fissure. If you've had a fissure, you know. It's the kind of pain that makes you afraid of your own body. You start dreading the bathroom the way some people dread the dentist.

The first three years: it kept getting worse

I kept telling myself it would pass. It didn't. Over the next three years it went from pain, to swelling, to full external hemorrhoids. Some days there was bleeding. Some days it was the itching that drove me crazy. There was no pattern I could figure out, no obvious trigger. It was just always there, waiting.

Here's the part I'm not proud of. My solution was to stop eating. Not a diet, not fasting for health. I fasted because if I didn't eat, I didn't have to go to the bathroom, and if I didn't go to the bathroom, it didn't hurt. That was my whole logic.

And honestly? It kind of worked, in the worst possible way. The bleeding calmed down for a while. But going to the bathroom still hurt every single time, and I was basically starving myself to avoid a symptom instead of fixing anything. Looking back, I was managing my fear, not my condition.

Year four: the wake-up call

By the fourth year, life piled on. Stress from my studies, stress from projects, pressure from everywhere. And every time the stress went up, the hemorrhoids came back harder. Whatever fragile balance I had was gone.

Then one day I found blood in my underwear. Not on the toilet paper. In my underwear, during a normal day, doing nothing.

That scared me in a way the daily pain never did. Pain you get used to. Blood showing up when you're just living your life, you don't get used to that.

The right move at that point was obvious: go see a doctor. I didn't. I was scared, and honestly I wasn't comfortable with someone examining me down there. I want to be clear about this: that was the wrong call. If you're reading this with blood in your underwear, please don't copy me on this part. Go get checked. Rectal bleeding can be hemorrhoids, but it can also be other things, and only a doctor can tell you which one you have.

What I did instead was go looking for a solution on my own.

What I tried

I tried everything the internet told me to try. Most of it did nothing. Some of it made things worse. I won't list every failed experiment because this page would never end.

But somewhere in all that searching, two things stuck.

First, I fixed my nutrition instead of avoiding food. This was the mental shift that mattered most. Instead of "eat less so I go less," it became "eat right so going doesn't hurt." Complete opposite of what I'd been doing for three years.

Second, psyllium husk. This was the game changer for me. I started taking it before meals, every day, consistently. Not when I remembered. Not when things flared up. Every day.

Alongside that, I used a lidocaine cream for local numbing before going to the bathroom, so the fear factor went down and I stopped tensing up. And I got serious about hygiene: keeping the area clean and, just as important, keeping it dry.

The four weeks that changed everything

Here's the honest part nobody tells you: nothing happened at first.

Week one, no difference. Week two, maybe slightly softer bowel movements, hard to say. I almost quit. I'd tried so many things by then that "another supplement that does nothing" felt like the obvious ending.

But somewhere around week three and four, it turned. Going to the bathroom got easier. Then easier again. The stools were soft, no straining, no bracing myself on the sink before walking into the bathroom.

And then, after about four weeks of taking psyllium husk consistently:

• The fissure healed
• The pain went away
• The bleeding stopped completely

I started eating whatever I wanted again. Normal meals, normal life. After years of treating food like the enemy, that alone felt like getting a piece of my life back.

Where I am now

I still take psyllium husk from time to time, especially during stressful periods, because I learned the hard way that stress is my trigger. But day to day?

No pain. No itching. No bleeding. No nothing.

That's not a marketing line. That's just my bathroom situation now, after four years where I couldn't have imagined writing that sentence.

What I'd tell 2020 me

1. See a doctor first. I got lucky that my problem was what I thought it was. You might not be. Get diagnosed, then work on the routine.
2. Stop avoiding food. Fasting to avoid the bathroom is treating the symptom while feeding the cause. Constipation gets worse when you barely eat.
3. Fiber only works if you're consistent. Psyllium husk isn't a painkiller. It took me four weeks. Most people quit at two.
4. Handle the fear, not just the pain. The lidocaine cream mattered less for the numbing and more because it let me stop dreading the bathroom. Fear makes you tense, and tension makes everything worse.
5. Hygiene and dryness are underrated. Cheap, unglamorous, and it made a real difference for the itching.

If any part of this sounds like your situation, I built this whole site to share what I learned along the way. Start with the routine that worked, be consistent, and please, do the one thing I didn't do: talk to a doctor.