Hi everyone, I'm new here! Hope I do everything right!
I'm a 21 year old woman and I've had digestive issues for my whole life. When I was very young my parents would always say how I had very large bowel movements for such a small girl. (gross I know!) My body always goes between being constipated (and relying on coffee in the morning to have a BM), having hard stool, soft stool, strange smelling stool, undigested food in stool, as well as occasionally random diarrhea.
In the summer of 2014 I was tested for lactose intolerance and that came back positive. A slice of cheese would have me in the bathroom all night with the worst pains and a fire-like feeling in my entire abdominal region. Safe to say the beginning of my freshman year of college was horrible! I have since cut out dairy from my diet.
I started noticing the bleeding with bowel movements earlier this year. It is always red blood, no clotting from what I can tell, and I do not feel pain. It got to be very bad at one point, which is why I went in to a gastro doctor. I had the smarts to take photos of the blood in the toilets and what my bowel movements looked like, and I kept a little journal explaining everything. He took a look and was like "Yeah something is happening" No duh! lol
Back in June of this year I had a colonoscopy and was scheduled for an endoscopy two days later. I didn't have the endoscopy two days later because my body did NOT react well to the colonoscopy. I had a high fever, was sick for a week, and just had a very horrible experience after that procedure. The colonoscopy came back normal, no hemorrhoids, no polyps, no tears or anything. Blood tests were normal I think. I actually don't know a lot about
my results because at that point I was so tired and just done with it all. I know the doctor didn't really care about
my case, I mean they have colonoscopy after colonoscopy scheduled, it's like a machine! But my doctor DID mention that when he got to the end of my large intestine and went into the very end of my small intestine, that my villi in that section of my SI was abnormal/flat. I still don't understand what that means and still don't understand why they never looked into that more. I think that might be a pretty important point if that part of my SI looked weird.
I had the endoscopy the first week of August, it said what I already knew, I have acid reflux, blah blah, esophagitis, I know all of this! If I do not take prilosec everything is set on fire! So no new information! Gah.
Well fast forward to these past two weeks. I had not been bleeding a lot the past few months, and if I was it wasn't more than what came off on the toilet paper. Just this morning I had my coffee, had a normal non-strenuous BM, felt no pain, and what do you know! Blood all in the toilet and on the toilet paper! Let me tell you, it was a good bit of blood, it scared me at first. Just now I went to the bathroom (just had to pee) and some gas let out and when I wiped there was a lot of red blood on the tp again! No straining whatsoever!
I'm so frustrated, my mom wants us to go and get a second opinion, but I am NOT up for another colonoscopy. I was in the worst pain after that first one, and I do not wish to experience that again if they only see my large intestine and colon and nothing is apparently wrong in there. How do they check the small intestines? Is there a procedure for that? Anyone know a good GI doctor in the New Orleans area?