My flare so far (with poo talk!)

about a week and a half to two weeks into this flare.

Beginning of last week: terrible abdominal pain and urgency, bleeding, poo was tons of tiny shreds. Upped my generic Colazal from 3 pills 3 times a day to 4 pills 3 times a day, added Canasa suppositories in the morning, and switched nightly enemas from mesalamine to hydrocort. Also started eating very blandly.

The abdominal pain mostly went away after a few days. I still have a twinge now and then, mostly in the left side where the colon turns. Poo progressed to large shreds, then formed long, thin stools. First thing this morning I had some very nicely formed largish stools (though a couple of small with them). A bit later, I had softer stools -- sort of gloppy, but also formed, if that makes any sense, both large and smaller. I still have the urgency and bleeding, though the urgency is less frequent during the day. I would say I'm going to the bathroom 6-8x a day, when my normal is 3-4x.

My doctor says to see how this goes for a few weeks, then if it's not significantly improved, he wants to talk about Uceris or biologics. I was supposed to have a colonoscopy last April, but it got canceled because of COVID. I was laid off in September, so between that and COVID fears, I haven't rescheduled. I did have a calprotectin test in September when I had a short flare (just bleeding), and the number on that was normal.

I had identified general stress and going off hormone replacement therapy as the culprits to trigger this flare. From reading the forum, I also realize that iron pills may have played a part too. I ran out of my gentle liquid iron, so to save money, I started using supposedly gentle iron pills soon before the flare. So perhaps there were many potential synergistic triggers.

Thanks for the thought about the fish oil, Quincy. I am on probiotics, currently Udo's Super-8 High Potency. I had been not taking one every day to save money, but have gone back to every day. I also used to take two fish oil pills a day, but switched to one a day for the same reason.

Post Edited (MmeMulot) : 2/10/2021 10:38:24 AM (GMT-7)

Old Hat, my generic balsalizide is manufactured by West Ward.

Ugh, a step back today. Three large, very urgent BMs today, and the third one was large shreds again. The first two BMs were lots of medium stools. Blood and mucus with the first one. Maybe a bit of blood with the other two, though couldn't really tell. Really thought things were looking up yesterday. Should it be a steady good progression, or is there sometimes two-steps-forward, one-step-back?

I always had two steps forward, one step back when coming out of flares.