After months of suffering and trying to convince doctors that my diarrhea wouldn't just "go away with imodium" I was finally c-scoped last week and imaging showed inflammation/ulcers. I was started on UC treatment of asacol800 3x daily plus daily sulofalk supp and enemma. The biopsy came back showing not indicative of IBD, meaning no markers of autoimmune. They did say the bipsy showed signs of ischemia (lack of oxygen to tissue in colon, causing death of cells). The GI Dr's "hunch" is that this is not autoimmune, but was caused either by an infection (that never showed on my numerous blood/fecal tests) or from the MASSIVE amounts of cipro/flagyl (antibiotics) they used to "treat" my diarrhea that I kept pestering them about
. He told me that once this inflammation etc has healed it is not likely to come back...then told me to follow up because sometimes this can be an early warning sign for IBD, and or trigger IBD. *** am I to do with that?
As far as my healing, I've been on the meds for about 8 days now. My BM's have decreased from 8-15/day prior to meds to about 2-4 per day. The thing is, my guts are still constantly cramping and all of my bowel movements are still very much diarrrhea, as in, no formation at all, liquid, pure, yellow, nasty liquid. This is my first flare, and hopefully my last as I am not showing signs of it being autoimmune, but, how does one go about healing from a flare> Does my progress sound sufficient? Should I be focusing just on the # of times i have a BM each day and not worry about the consistency? Any kind of time frame from you guys would be great.
P.S. I am also taking a probiotic (over a month) and just yesterday started taking metamucil fibre pills (starting at 1 per day) to try to bulk things back up.