It has only been 18 days since I was lying in the ER at Evergreen Redmond thinking that I just was unable to eat anything at all without my gut turning against me and causing me nothing but grief. Two days later after finding out the doctors at Puget Sound Gastro had given up on me I sat sobbing at the Bothell Natural Health clinic waiting to see Dr. Christine Bowen who had become sort of my last hope. Dr. Bowen got me back on the Intro phase of the diet, minus dairy, I’d started back in January, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, SCD. SCD was popularized but Elaine Gottschall’s book Breaking the Vicious Cycle which is appropriately named since I was indeed in a vicious cycle that needed breaking. This time she wanted me to do it right with only eating ground meats, baby food vegetables, fruit sauces and lots of gelatin. I was skeptical but Dr. Bowen wasn’t. She said she’d seen SCD turn people back from the grave and that the diet definitely worked if followed precisely, something I didn’t do the last time I started it. She said we could change the microbiom of the gut in a day and get me back into balance. Her faith rubbed off a bit and I gave it a shot.
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Do I still have SIBO or not???
Today I got the results back from my most recent breath test from March 9th. The way I felt the day I took the test and the way I’ve felt off and on since I was expecting things to look much worse than they did back in January when I was showing between 33-44ppm CH4 from my breath, that is a fair bit of methane to be exhaling. Well, today the results showed that I’m actually doing much better. In fact, good enough that according to most doctors I would not be classified as having SIBO any longer. Dr. Pimental, however, uses a different standard and says than any CH4 over 3ppm anywhere in the chart is a sign of SIBO since we just should not be producing methane on our own. That means my friend, Methanobrevibacter smithii, is probably still roaming around in my SI though in about 1/4 to 1/5 the quantity than before.
My Un-FitBit
As part of this whole SIBO mess I found myself using multiple tools to track symptoms, food consumption, and bodily functions. I started out using the My Wonderful Days app which was pretty nice since it worked on iOS and OSX but that meant manually figuring out all my calories for all the foods each day. It also had no graphing capability so I had a big Numbers spreadsheet stored in iCloud too that I would move weight, calories, sleep hours, etc… from the journalling app into so that I could see a chart. Lots of work.
Back to baby food…
Yum, pureed carrots
What a week I’ve been through and it is only Thursday. My gut has been a wreck for almost the last month since I tried the antibiotic treatment but it hit a new level of crisis over last weekend. I was prepping for a new SIBO test on Sunday morning and had to eat a protein and fat only diet for two days as part of the prep then fast for 12 hours plus the 4 hours for the test. On day 2 of the meat and fat diet I actually felt good, I figured that with no carbs to ferment my gut had settled down. I ate dinner, chicken drumsticks (my mistake) and some halibut, and a few hours later the bloating, churning, waterfalls, and pain were in full force. Sleep was nearly impossible due to all the intestinal distress I was in.
SIBO Update – confusion reigns
Meet Methanobrevibacter smithii, the little bastards that have been causing me a ton of grief for the last several months. This guy eats up hydrogen from other bacteria and then emits methane gas. I finally got my actual breath test results back the other day and I’m emitting 0ppm H and 33ppm CH4 at baseline with a peak of 44ppm after about an hour which means that these guys, as well as some other bacteria, are living somewhere in my small intestine where they don’t belong. This is a mild to moderate case of SIBO, I’d hate to see what a severe case of SIBO is like because mild totally sucks.