In January, my cousin Sally made a startling confession to me.
"Help! I've got hemorrhoids! What am I going to do?" I listened sympathetically while Sally told me all about it.
She was seeing bright spots of blood on the toilet paper, she had a pain in her tummy when she was trying to pass a bowel motion and a lot of the time she couldn't get comfy when she was sitting down.
Sally wanted to know how long do hemorrhoids last? Unfortunately, I couldn't give her a definite answer, but I did ask her how long she'd had them for.
"Oh, for about three months, but I think they're getting worse!" Then I asked Sally if she had any idea why she got hemorrhoids in the first place.
After thinking back a few months, she finally realized that she'd stopped cooking wholesome meals and had started eating a lot of fast food and take-out, as she had been a lot busier at work and was too tired to cook from scratch when she got home.
So I suggested that when she's at work to make sure she got up every hour or so and give her butt vein inflammation a rest.
She could walk around the office looking busy for a couple of minutes, walk to the bathroom or walk to the break room and get a glass of water.
I also told her that switching from healthy meals to fast food had probably given her constipation which in turn had led to hemorrhoids.
For a natural hemorrhoids cure, I told her to cut out all the junk food and start cooking healthy meals again with plenty of vegetables and brown rice or wholemeal pasta.
But Sally protested.
"I'm too tired to do that when I get home from work.
All I want to do is chill out.
" So Sally and I came up with a possible solution.
She would make up a batch of healthy meals on the weekend, portion them up into single serves and freeze them.
That way, she would have a home cooked nutritious meal every evening and all she would have to do is heat it up.
Following on with the same natural hemorrhoids cure, I told her to stop wasting money buying her lunch at work and instead bring a healthy sandwich and piece of fruit for her lunch.
And to stop drinking coffee and switch to plain water.
Three weeks after Sally had told me she'd got hemorrhoids, she called me and said her hemorrhoid condition was a lot better, although it had been hard at times to resist temptation with her favorite junk food.
"This natural hemorrhoids cure really worked," Sally said gleefully down the phone line.
"Thanks!"