I didn’t poop for a month — but it got me 244,000 followers

A woman has kept hundreds of thousands of viewers captivated with her battle to be able to poop again after more than a month of pain and unsuccessful attempts.

Cherine Docherty, 39, began documenting her constipation consternation after mysteriously developing bowel problems in February 2022 and is now living with a colostomy bag following months of treatments for an unknown ailment.

Docherty has shared her struggles — from a severely swollen stomach to burst colostomy bags — with her 244,000 TikTok followers, and in the process, she has garnered praise for her brutally honest videos about her struggles to poop and visits to doctors and hospitals without getting answers.

The Scottish woman first gained traction on July 11 after posting a TikTok and writing: “Day 34 of not doing a [poo emoji],” showing off her distended stomach and saying she looked “eight months pregnant.”

The video has more than a million views, with Docherty using the platform to regularly post updates about her struggles and successes while battling the mysterious illness.

She received surgery for a colostomy bag on July 15 after months of being in and out of the hospital, where every four weeks she was given medication to facilitate going to the bathroom.

A colostomy bag collects waste from the body through an opening, called a stoma, that is formed between the large intestine (colon) and the abdominal wall during surgery.

The day after the surgery, she was able to finally “poop” — despite enduring “the worst pain ever” — which she celebrated in a video viewed by more than 406,000.

“Bless you hun, keep up the positivity, thank you for bringing awareness to a subject rarely talked about,” one TikTok viewer said in praise of her perseverance, while another — reportedly a former colostomy-bag user — said to “just take one day at a time.”

In later clips, Docherty said she was growing more concerned for her health as she was having trouble breathing and has Stage 3 chronic kidney disease and asthma, which she was concerned would get worse.

Docherty told Insider that doctors would have rather performed a procedure called ileoanal anastomosis, which involves removing her large intestine and reattaching the rest of her digestive system. However, that’s reportedly a 12-hour operation with a long wait list, so they decided against it.

Unfortunately for Docherty, the operation wasn’t an instant fix without complications, and she shared some horror stories on her TikTok, including when her colostomy bag leaked.

“I’m not joking when I say I was covered in s – – t,” she told Insider.

“It was an absolute nightmare,” she added. “I’ve had to set my alarm every single hour, every night since I’ve been discharged from hospital, just because I’m so scared of that happening again.”

Docherty said she still doesn’t know the reason behind her bowel issues but is grateful that TikTok has helped others address their own medical issues — adding that TikTok followers have also helped keep her spirits up and given her helpful advice.

“There’s a lot of big TikTokers that do get negativity, but for some reason, I don’t really,” she said.

“I get lots of people tagging me in their videos saying, ‘This is the very, very first video I’ve made, but here’s my stoma bag, thank you very much for encouraging me to do it,’ ” she told Insider. “That’s just been really good.”