IBS and nausea...

Hello folks, I am a 50 year old male diagnosed with severe IBS. I gather it is somewhat unusual for "men" to have IBS. But I have it. BIG TIME. My wife found this forum and emailed it to me. I have similar but different issues with nausea/dizziness/energy drain. But mine occurs after voiding either urine or stool, but not all the time. I can go two weeks without any symptoms then go empty my bladder or stool and 10 minutes later I'm hit HARD by nausea/dizziness/energy drain. It sucks the life right out of me. Dare I say - this crap sucks!!

This started up after having 12 inches of my colon removed due to Diverticulitis. I call Diverticulitis little men with machetes!! I'm truly grateful to be free of that misery but now I have to fight recurring nausea/dizziness/energy drain. My GI surgeon who did the resection says sometimes when they go into the gut the disruption caused by the surgery causes what I have. Well aint that special?! How do we FIX it?! He has me on Nortriptylene nightly, Zofran and Hycosamine as needed for the nausea/dizziness/energy drain. Sure these help somewhat but I want this crap to STOP!!!

I totally understand when some of you say your doctor looks at you like you are a freak of nature. I get that a lot in my quest to RESOLVE this. I want this to STOP! Because it stops me. It truly ruins my life. I haven't worked since Feb of this year. I am a talented Systems Engineer who has built a successful career. I stopped working because I can no longer trust "my system" to not let me and my employer down. I'm trying to figure out what next looks like. I've no clue right now.

So that's my misery. If anyone else is in the same boat I'd love to hear from ya. I'm at my wits end with this............................... I'm prone to using vastly more offensive words to describe my misery so please forgive any of the above.

Do know that I understand what this misery does to us.

I am sorry to hear your husband is in so much distress.

There are some questions I need t ask the IBS experts about on your issue.

Honestly, not sure you can call it "IBS" if part of the colon was removed, as opposed to gi symptoms.

I need to clairify this with the experts.

Two things off the top of my head that might help are probiotics and stress reduction therapies. My brother also had part of his colon removed because of  Diverticulitis and has GI symnptoms, but not clinical IBS.

Stress reduction is way more important then mst people think in generating symptoms.

Have you read the IBS 101 thread?

I will get back to you here and see what I can find out.

 

Just so you know, with IBS they understand quite a biit about it all, but NOT the root cause. Something haven't been figured out yet fully.

you might look over this site.

http://www.aboutibs.org/

techinally IBS is diagnose when they can't find anything wrong.

Since your husband had part of his colon removed that can cause some issues.

But again I need to ask about this aspect. Hopefully next week as soon as I can get ahold of someone.

yoginan - Hi there, I've had part of my colon removed due to colon cancer, 11 years ago. I've been on a low residue diet ever since and I'm still here to type. lol

What I would recommend is mostly plain food but more importantly, a food journal. Any ordinary 1 subject notebook will suffice. Designate one page per day, front of page, not back. That way you can easily flip back to previous days to see what you ate. Record every single thing he eats, drinks, any meds he took, if he was under a lot of stress at the time, possibly sick with a cold or the flu. All important details. You may think eating 1/2 a candy bar isn't important info but it is. After a while he'll see a pattern begin to form and probably be able to determine what foods to avoid, which ones to eat more often.

My go-to foods are from the LRD:

Organic plain or vanilla flavored yogurt (Brown Cow is an excellent brand, found at health food stores)
Cottage Cheese
Bananas
Applesauce
White bread, plain bagels, plain english muffins (Bay's found in the refrigerated section are great, not the wheat ones)
Plain saltines (Club Crackers are my choice)
Mashed potatoes (oddly enough instant over from scratch)
White rice
Plain pasta (egg noodles with a little butter, or mac/cheese)
Chicken
Turkey (a cold turkey sub on white sub buns can really turn things around for me, Penn Station is my favorite sub shop for bad days)

As my husband would joke, think white foods. And I would strongly suggest he stay away from any whole wheat product (for now), any fresh berry (skip blueberries, strawberries, red raspberries, blackberries, all will wreak havoc on his touchy gut), skip fresh pineapple. In fact canned fruit is easily on the gut as opposed to fresh fruit (except bananas).

I wish you both luck with this yoginan.

BTW, whining and venting is beneficial to managing all of this too. I think most of us new to IBS like woes go thru that. I know I need to whine for a bit and come to terms with my old normal, 1 dump a day habits (gone FOREVER!). I grieved for the old days for a while but eventually I had a pep talk with myself and said - "buck up Mary, you will get thru this and figure things out." And I did, took me a while but I also learned that these words can be taken literally for colon resection/surgical patients - we are what we eat. Those words are so true.

Mary/Marsky

I agree with what Marsky says about a food journal. It's really hard to find the patterns of what you eat or drink from memory alone.

I'd also encourage you to consider food "allergies" which in the case of your symptoms would be better described as food intolerance. Common allergens/irritants are nuts, peanuts, gluten, dairy, corn, corn syrup, fuctose, yeast, chocolate, and caffeine. If you haven't already I'd cut them ALL out. Yep, all. It will be hard, and you really have to read labels carefully. Once it's all out of your diet, wait and see if things stabilize. If they do, then one or more of those thing was your culprit. Add some of these suspects back in one at a time, and give it a good long trial to see if they bring the symptoms back. For example, add milk back in. If there's no problem, then add another back in. Also consider different forms of the same allergen--my mom, who has a host of GI issues, can eat milk chocolate but not dark chocolate, popcorn but not corn syrup, yogurt and cheese but not milk and butter. Changing your diet may not clear up all your symptoms, but for many people with GI issues it makes a significant difference!