Quote:
Originally Posted by ronni62
How did they diagnose your problem and find a solution?
In December there was a GI bug going around my family. Everyone else got a day of diarrhea and nausea and was fine. I got a week of nausea, followed by a day of slightly looser stools. A week and a half after that was my annual physical, and I said to the doctor "I had this GI bug, and I'm still kind of achy..." She told me it could last up to three weeks after gastroenteritis. So when I hit 4 weeks and was in enough pain that I wasn't eating, I went in again.
We did....
An ultrasound of my gallbladder that came up normal.
A prescription of Bentyl that made the pain better (and helped wean me off narcotics for pain relief, but had its own nasty side effects)
A CT that came up normal.
A low residue/soft foods diet (which helped symptomatically)
A colonoscopy that came up with no abnormal biopsies, but diverticula in the ascending, transverse -and- descending colon.
And the very best I felt in a month and a half was during the middle of the colonoscopy prep.
They had me increase my fiber (Because that's the standard recommendation for diverticulosis) and -nothing- moved. I could feel my intestines spasming, but it didn't have an effect. The pain was pretty awful, so I stopped the fiber and went back to a low residue diet.
I met with the GI again, and we talked about the Bristol scale, and what I thought was "normal". We also touched on some aspects of the Rome II Criteria. I was pretty surprised to realize that I've been constipated for as long as I can remember, because it was just -normal- for me. That almost certainly explains my first diverticula being found when I was 22. So I actually have.... chronic idiopathic constipation, an idiosyncratic response to fiber, diverticular disease, and (at the time) subclinical diverticulitis.
I'd been experimenting with fiber and miralax after the colonoscopy and found that I could tolerate more fiber if I also took more miralax. At the time, I'd been taking miralax an hour or two after meals, because I didn't know if there was a malabsorption risk. The GI said I could take as much miralax as needed to keep things soft (but to let him know if there was an unexplained jump in either direction), and that I could take it with meals if it helped. He also said to expect to take miralax for the rest of my life if I wanted to keep my colon, due to the diverticular disease.
Currently I mix up a pint of juice with 3 doses of miralax in it every day, and eyeball how much I think I need with each meal. Some days I have a little left, and some days I mix more in the evening. I'm not perfect with the dosing yet, and there's a lot of experimentation ahead of me to see what foods give me more pain, but I'm definitely seeing the slow, steady improvement my GI told me I could expect.