Another year gone by already and what a year it was. I spent a lot of this year dealing with a relapse of SIBO and some other health issues but still managed to get outside every single day, got in a lot of hunting and fishing and had quite a few good trips locally, to the LA area and to British Columbia. So much, in fact, I couldn’t even really get it all in the picture grid.
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After failing to knock out the SIBO relapse with a month of herbals I decided to try something new – Atrantil. Atrantil was designed by a GI doctor in Texas specifically for methane dominant SIBO. It is a combination of three herbs that is reported to block the ability of methanogens to actually create methane thus give relief from symptoms. Studies show it works about 80% of the time in tough to treat cases but it is unclear whether it just stops symptoms or actually kills off the bacteria.
About a two months ago I started having some symptoms that reminded me of when I first started getting SIBO back in 2013 – a dull full feeling under my right rib-cage, bloating, burping, etc… After a few weeks of it I decided to just start treating it in hopes of knocking it out quickly so did a month of AlliMed/Neem/Berberine. I had my ups and downs over the month and settled into a strict Paleo diet and felt better thinking that maybe I had licked it. I decide to test and see where I was actually at and was stunned at the results:
Worst test result I’ve had to date, high of 62 when my previous high had been in the 49 and that took nearly two years to clear out. My baseline was off the charts high so it makes me think my system is simply full of m.smithii again.
Frustrating and depressing to say the least especially on top of this whole hormone mess I’m dealing with at the moment and I’m sure the two are somewhat related. I’m not sure what direction to go with this. I can:
I’ll sync up with my ND in a week or so, summer vacations, and try to come up with a plan of attack to see if I can get these numbers back down and not feel like crap again. Until then I know I’m sticking to a lower FODMAP Paleo diet since I definitely feel better eating that way than the expanded gluten-free diet I had been on.
Over the last four years I’ve been up and down on whether or not I had developed MS. Back in 2014 when my feet got tingly and went numb we suspected MS but then it turned out to probably be antibiotic induced peripheral neuropathy. In 2015 when we ran an extensive autoimmune panel and found I had myelin antibodies plus some new weird neurological symptoms we went back and did an MRI and, no sign of MS. I thought I’d put it to rest when in 2017 I started getting burning pain in my lower left leg. At first it was sporadic and chiropractic seemed to help so I thought it was structural. By the start of 2018 the pain was daily and interfering more with life. My ND at the time thought it was compression related so back to running an MRI to see what was going on with my discs.
Back in 2015 after being on a Paleo diet for a little over a year my cholesterol was up but I wasn’t too concerned about it at the time. I kept on Paleo and even went hard-core Wahls Paleo Plus/Keto for a while last fall. In 2016 my cholesterol numbers were again high but my doctor wasn’t concerned, same thing in early 2018. Each time my values were up but ratios looked good, no inflammatory markers and I was showing low risk of cardiovascular disease on the NMR profile. Then in the late fall I started having some weird symptoms and went in for blood work. What came back cholesterol wise wasn’t too much of a surprise in the standard lipid panel but it was the new advanced markers that were a bit scarier.
2018 was a good year but a tough year in several respects and I’m actually kind of glad this one is over with. Thanks to Lira I hiked close to 2000 miles this year and we managed to get out and do quite a bit of fishing and hunting, logging 108 days total in the water, hills or fields. I also somehow managed to build a boat for the sole purpose of taking her fishing with me since she coludn’t quite work out in a float tube. Catherine and I had a lot of fun spending many days exploring the Middle Fork Valley this year and also camping and hiking on the Oregon coast.
Back in 2014 when I was dealing with SIBO and my feet started going numb we were a bit worried about MS and my doctor sent me off to a neurologist to see what was going on. At that time it turned out I had neuropathy probably caused by the antibiotics. In 2015 we found I had myelin antibodies from the autoimmune panel from Cyrex and so I had to go in for another neurological check and an MRI. That MRI came back clean in the spring of 2015 and so I sort of figured I was out of the woods on this one.
Fast forward to last fall. I started having frequent burning sensations in the front of my left leg and assumed it was due to the bad discs in my neck which were found in the MRI. I went to a chiro and did my usual routine on the discs but the burning pain didn’t really go away and slowly got more frequent to where it was a daily occurrence. My new naturopath looked at my MRI and thought I had not only bad discs but also a thickening of the ligament that runs along the spinal cord. So, back to the neurologist for me with hopes that this was a structural issue that could be handled by surgery.
Well if there is one thing that is for certain it is that the SIBO world in changing at rapid speed these days and Dr. Mark Pimentel of Cedars-Sinai dropped a few bombshells at the recent SIBO Symposium. I didn’t attend this year’s Symposium but I got a good summary from Shari so I’m just going to paste her notes here and then comment:
This is a question that has come up a LOT on the Facebook SIBO group and I thought I’d give my opinions on the matter having been a vegan and having suffered through SIBO. I was on the spectrum from vegan to pescatarian most of my adult life, I think the last red meat or poultry I ate was at 18 years old until I got SIBO at 53. This was a decision made for religious reasons as well as moral reasons to try and help save the planet and it wasn’t one made lightly. Originally I was hard-core vegan living on rice and soy for the most part then switched to adding dairy and eggs to my diet with some occasional fish. For many years we lived this way, eating fish often when traveling, otherwise maybe a few times a month. Sometime a few years before I got SIBO I started having problems with dairy and went back to being vegan.
2016 turned out to be a much better your than even 2015 was for me and really was shaped by our new family member – an Australian Labradoodle puppy we named Lira (river in Aboriginal Australian). Catherine and I had been talking about getting a dog again and I wanted one that could hunt since I got back into hunting as well as be a good family dog. We also wanted a non-shedding dog if possible. This narrowed our options down to basically two breeds – a Pudelpointer or a Labradoodle. We were on waiting lists for Pudelpointers when I found a breeder that had hunting doodles as well as Pudelpointers and after talking to her decided that the doodle would be a better dog for us.