Symprove. It’s a probiotic.

I’ve been necking 70ml of this probiotic drink first thing every morning for a week now. I’ll be doing it for eleven more weeks and updating you every step of the way, because there aren’t enough Symprove diaries out there.

To give it to you in layman terms, folks with healthy digestive systems, who eat whatever they please and poop once a day at the same time, have balanced gut bacteria. There’s bad bacteria present, but there’s enough in the way of good bacteria to keep everything steady. But then there are folks with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), who eat restricted diets and still can’t work out whether their next bathroom visit is going to be a pleasant or unwelcome one. They don’t have that same balance of good and bad bacteria. In theory, Symprove attempts to restore some order by populating the unbalanced areas of the digestive system with enough strains of good bacteria to settle things down. It’s been a complete cure for some people over the years, it’s been a spectacular failure for others, and for some people, nothing has changed at all. All for the price of around £140–150.

The plan was to start it anyway, at some point, because my IBS was mostly manageable but slowly wearing me down all the same. My diet was, until recently, limited to poultry and fish, brown and white rice, and some vegetables. My weight was dropping slowly and eating any meal of any kind was becoming a stress. The idea was to work up to Symprove after the summer, but taking antibiotics for an ear infection two weeks ago left behind a wreckage and probably gave me some kind of intestinal infection, so I’ve started Symprove earlier than planned. As of right now, I’ve got no idea whether the antibiotics actually did cause an infection or whether they just knocked my gut bacteria even further off, but those test results are still in transit somewhere been a University of Manchester laboratory and my GP’s e-mail inbox, so Symprove gets the nod.

Symptoms-wise, there’s been a tiny improvement, but we’re starting from a very low floor. I might as well have had food poisoning a week ago: I’d wake up and have to immediately leap out of bed to get to the toilet. Then I’d eat at 08:00, 13:00 and 18:00 and have to make miserable bathroom trips at 09:00, 14:00 and 19:00, and then probably again just before bed. Nothing I ate was staying inside and my weight was dropping further. I was already far enough underweight. I spent the morning of July 24th in the emergency room, having fainted following a morning shot of diarrhoea. For the rest of the day, my digestive system would moan and sputter and twist about the place in between those all-too-frequent bathroom trips. I’d constantly feel fluids moving from one side of my body to the other, and I’d feel trapped wind lurking about in there, eager to make its escape, which it inevitably, always did. I’ve still not gone back to work, but I plan to on August 1st.

If you speak to someone at Symprove’s call-centre, they’ll probably tell you the taste of their product is “distinctive”. They’re not lying. Its scent is also, shall we say, unique. Just imagine somebody threw vinegar, lager, acid and maybe a single apple into a vat, swirled it around for a while until it frothed slightly, tossed a load of live bacteria strains in there and poured into a bottle with Symprove labels stuck to it. I get to drink 70ml of that every single morning. Glorious. It’s why they offer a mango & passion fruit flavour if you’re so inclined, but I prefer to just have the “original” flavour of everything. Besides, the taste is something you get used to after the first day or two, and if you keep that voice in your head reminding you that medicine is supposed to taste like garbage, you’ll be fine.

A week on this stuff, though, and things are definitely better than they were seven days ago. I’m down to one or two toilet trips per day and food is actually staying inside me. They’re not exactly pleasant, relaxing experiences where can I sit and focus on the crossword (apparently Symprove initially causes diarrhea regardless of whether you’ve been torn to shreds by Flucloxacillin) but they’re not hellish, frightening incidents either, and they don’t cause me to faint suddenly. I feel some movements of air inside my system, I feel fluid make its cross-stomach journey more often than I’d like to, and I think I’m developing mild heartburn, but I’m a rung up from the bottom. It should be noted that, in addition to taking Symprove, I’ve also doubled my dose of Loperamide Hydrochloride from 4mg daily to 8mg, and I’ve been “protecting my gut” with Saguna’s Silico Gel from Holland & Barrett. With these three factors working together, you’d expect the situation to have improved.

In an ideal world, I’d be able to stand here and say the Symprove alone was working miracles here, and that my gut health had already been restored. But there’s a reason Symprove encourage you to complete a twelve week course: building up good bacteria takes time. That means, in between times, your digestive system needs all the help it can get to cope with the new guests. In addition to doubling my Loperamide and trying out this Silico Gel, I’ve been expanding my diet again. There are things I’ve eaten this past week that I’ve not touched in almost a year. Crisps, bananas, soya yoghurt, spinach and cucumber, red meat. The fact that I’m not living in the bathroom right now after eating some of these things is an encouraging sign that my current combination of Symprove, Silico and Loperamide capsules is keeping things above the surface. For now, at least. I never like to be too sure.

So, erm, come back next week?