What were your early signs before a flare?

Lower back pain and muscle aches

Actually, if you are noticing changes, it's a flare....albeit really really mild inflammation presenting.

My first symptoms of a flare are stomach pain, gas, fatigue and slight change in stool if I cant contribute it to food.

The clincher is urgency and rectal discomfort with bms.

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The important ones your doctor asks during visits are: any blood?, any urgency?, and bm frequency?.

If you are consistently seeing blood on toilet paper when wiping your bum, or a slick of blood on the surface of the toilet water then those are flare signs (unless you have a history of hemorrhoids). And we're talking bright-red, obvious blood and NOT things that could be false-positives (no orange, etc.).

Urgency is often a flare sign. If you normally can hold it, but lately have been barely making it, or running then it's a sign of flares.

When your bm frequency has increased for 4-5 days in a row or more, then that is a flare sign. I'm normally a 1-2 bm a day person, but if I consistently creep up to 3-4 a day then that's a definite flare sign.

Some of the veterans claim that increased gas, mucus, abdominal discomfort, and various other things can also be signs of a flareup. Lots of chances for these to be false-positives and cause needless worry. It's really about knowing your own body over time, knowing your own UC, and what those things mean. Not broad-across-the-board things for everyone. Especially not for those new to UC.

It's a fine line. We do not want to be paranoid of flaring on a daily basis, lots of false positives we can find inadvertently. We can all have bad days, that's normal. We also do not want to be complacent and ignore the red-flag-waving signs of a flare up until we fall off the diving board into the deep end of a really bad flare. A flare is a consistent and persistent worsening of your symptoms. If it's worse for 4-5 days, a week or more, then you have a trend going. One bad day is just that and nothing to be anxious about.

And to that note, some of us veterans will temporarily increase our med dosing from flare to maintenance dosing when we're worried we might be flaring (i.e., go from 2,400mgs a day to 4,800mgs a day of oral mesalamine, and return to nightly rowasa enemas) for 2-4 weeks as an experiment to see if we feel better. It's a reasonable precaution that does no harm, and might just nip a budding-flare.

You can always ask at your upcoming doctors appointment for a Faecal Calprotectin (FCP) stool test or C-Reactive Protein (CRP) blood test to check inflammation levels. The FCP is the most accurate, as it is intestine-specific inflammation. Whereas CRP is bodywide. And/or you can ask about temporarily upping your daily doses within your prescription for the mesalamines for a while to see if that helps.

Post Edited (iPoop) : 10/18/2018 11:21:24 AM (GMT-6)

Kate, for me the tell tale sign is always added mucus in stool. Starts out more cloudy, then more stringy, and then I see traces of blood. Along side it, more cramping or rumbling in the tummy and added BM freq from 1 a day to 2-3. Agree with some of the comments, always good to step up dosing at early sign.

Good luck to you!

My first symptom was what felt like a consistent, but very mild stomach ache. Just lots of discomfort accompanied by ATROCIOUS joint pain. The joint pain was worse than anything else. It was so bad that I specifically went to the doctor because of it. They couldn't find out for the life of them what it was being caused by....

Dead tissue?
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Got it
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