I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to share my recent experience with C. diff and ulcerative colitis, with the hope that it will help someone else in a similar situation. I am about
to be discharged from Mass General Hospital after a 72-day hospitalization, and it ended up being a fecal transplant that saved me from losing my colon. I was so close to getting surgery that I still have an "X" marked on my belly that was telling the surgeon where to make the cut for my ileostomy.
I am 31 years old, very active, and eat an extremely healthy diet (no white flour, no white sugar, no artificial anything, no dairy, and no cheat days ever). My healthy lifestyle has kept my ulcerative colitis under fairly good control, and I had been medication-free for about
two years before recently ending up in the hospital. In the beginning of August, I started getting symptoms of an ulcerative colitis flare (bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain), and being the stubborn person I am, I tried waiting things out to see if they would resolve with conservative measures. Two weeks into this, I did a 50 mile backpacking trip in New Hampshire up some major mountains, and after returning home, I learned that I had C. diff. As I'm writing this, I am 86 pounds (I'm normally 120 pounds), malnourished, and can't even step up one stair without the aid of a railing. C. diff is no joke, and it completely starved my body of any reserves it had left.
To make a long story short, my hospital stay involved alternating between treating my ulcerative colitis with steroids and Remicade (which then suppressed my immune system and made the C. diff worse), and having multiple recurrences of C. diff which didn't respond to antibiotics. The C. diff infection worsened the ulcerative colitis, but the treatment for ulcerative colitis worsened the C. diff. I failed three rounds of vancomycin, one round of Dificid (fidaxomicin), and one round of IV Flagyl (metronidazole). I became extremely malnourished, and multiple sigmoidoscopies demonstrated severe inflammation in my colon. The only option left before surgery was a fecal transplant. The typical approach is to do this via colonoscopy, but my colon was so inflamed they were nervous it would perforate. So instead, I did the capsule (a.k.a. "poop pill") method, and after 10 days I was not only better... I was symptom-free and felt absolutely amazing (this was after suffering for 54 days in the hospital and not responding to any treatments). That trend has continued, and now I'm finally (soon to be) on my way home.
Because there isn't a lot of information on the fecal transplant experience, I wrote a detailed blog post on my experience, including day-by-day reports of how my body responded to the treatment. I also include a more detailed story of my hospital stay, as well as supplements that have helped me in my treatment and recovery. To avoid repeating myself, I will stop typing and encourage you to click on my story
here. I highly recommend getting a fecal transplant to anyone who is suffering from C. diff and is reading this right now. It truly saved my life!
http://www.greenadrenaline.com/blog/fmtPost Edited (swhitty) : 11/5/2019 5:05:05 AM (GMT-7)