Posted 11/27/2012 2:27 AM (GMT 0)
I have been dealing with serious digestive troubles the past few days!! (and with a history of almost a year!)
First let me explain the symptoms:
I have this VERY STRANGE issue going on with severe gas, diarrhea, and nausea & sometimes vomiting. These issues do not specifically start after eating anything. And they often have a very consistent pattern in timing. The symptoms usually start to become very apparent during the evening and nighttime hours (after the symptoms slowly build up during the day... apparently) I usually start off having gas during the day, and it sometimes worsens towards the evening and night, and the gas is so bad that I end up looking 6 months pregnant sometimes!!!!!!! Literally! And with that, I start burping a lot, and (disgusting for me to say) they often taste and smell like EGGS**. When I start "burping eggs", then I know something is wrong -- that is my biggest indicator. The burping eventually makes me really nauseous and makes me want to vomit sometimes (towards the end). I have noticed the gas is almost always associated with diarrhea, and towards the end of my flare-up it will be SEVERELY watery. The nausea usually happens towards the morning hours like 6, 7, and 8 am and sometimes I will vomit twice or I may not vomit at all. After being up all night, having a good sleep in the morning will eventually help it to go away. But even after it goes away, I can somehow tell that the "sickness" is still there. It lasts for days, even if I may not have these symptoms for a night or two. It likes to "lie dormant" in my system and then re-erupt a few days later, as I like to say. The last two flare ups I had, I noticed that the nausea was primarily due to the extremely excessive gas I had pushing against my stomach. And I felt like I wanted to vomit mostly when I felt the diarrhea & gas rumble through my intestines. And might I add that the flatulence smelled bad as well as lingered a while. I think the gas is the biggest contributor--could that be why I "burp eggs"? I usually burp when the gas builds up right under my stomach and gets a little stuck there... and the burping part is the part I hate most about the whole ordeal.
I originally believed I had gotten possibly a bacterial stomach bug when I first experience this a year ago, because it seemed to last for weeks and the symptoms were off and on. Sometimes it would lie dormant in my system and then it would flare up at least a few times a week at the time. Then I thought maybe it was parasitic because it just seemed to linger... (reasons why I believed it was bacterial or parasitic related was because my husbands family often times buy whole pigs and sometimes deer and they chop the animal in their back yard for their meat, and as I would sometimes eat this meat I was also concerned about how sanitized the meats were. Also at the time the kitchen was TERRIBLY infested with roaches at night, so I was also concerned about sanitation of the food/kitchen as well.)
The reason why I posted this in the IBS section is because my mother and aunt both have IBS and I was wondering if that was a possible cause. I recall talking to my mother about some mild digestive issue in the past before these symptoms ever began and saw that I seemed to have some similar issues as my mother did except MUCH milder at the time. However, sometimes it doesn't seem too much like IBS to me, because on a normal day, I don't have much gas problems or bowl issues. It is only when I have these flare-ups that the gas is terrible and diarrhea. Most of my life I have occasionally had mild gas problems, so it's not entirely new to me, however it has never been to this extent.
**Also I may note, in the past I had experienced these problems a lot when I lived in this same household, as I had moved to my mothers house for a few months. At my mother's house i did not experience these symptoms almost at all except once or maybe twice, as her household was ROACH-FREE. However I have moved back to the same location (back to a roach infested kitchen, however not as bad as before) and all of a sudden have been experiencing these problems A LOT again: A reason to believe that it may be a contamination of some sort.**
As far as I know, I am not lactose intolerant, because I have drunk milk ALL of my life and never had any issues. I actually quit drinking milk recently because I don't like the mucus-inducing effects of milk anyway. Because I previously thought it was pathogen-related, I actually have made it a point to make sure I cook foods properly and wash utensils in order to reduce any chance of contamination during my cooking process, but it just seems like I still get sick anyway despite all of that. I am actually thinking of making a food journal if these issues continue because I really want to find the source!
If anyone has any ideas of what it could be please let me know!!