SIBO comic book by Dr. Sandberg-Lewis from the SIBO Center. The guy also plays a mean guitar singing about the digestive system.

It has been a little over six months since my gut totally exploded after Christmas and started this whole adventure into the world of SIBO.   I guess it has really been about 9 months but the first three months or so were manageable, it didn’t become really nasty until the end of December when I went back to my normal rice & bean diet after the candida cleanse we did when I thought this was only candida.   It has been six months of ups and downs and still trying to unravel this mess in my gut.

After taking Doxycycline last fall and having gastric distress I went through a whole month of hell and rapid weight loss in January trying to figure out what exactly was wrong with me.    When I found I didn’t have cancer but instead something called SIBO I was pretty happy, SIBO seemed like something that could be cleared up in a few weeks.  Boy was I wrong.  At least with colon cancer you can cut something out if caught early enough, with SIBO you just somehow have to sterilize your small intestine while not destroying your large intestine in the process and then fix any underlying motility issues that allow the bacteria to migrate upstream in the first place.   It is a bitch to get rid of as I’ve since found out and while it is there complications abound.

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I finally started coming out of my relapse last Saturday and have felt fairly decent since Monday morning.  My gut has remained pretty calm most of the time, even after dinner with just a small level of symptoms.  My feet are still numb and bothering me some but I’ll see the neurologist next Friday to start looking into that issue.  Also doing another vitamin cocktail push into my veins that day.   I have an endoscopy scheduled for Monday the 23rd though the bad pressure in my upper GI has let up a lot since my SIBO symptoms have been clearing out.

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During my early May appointment my doctor asked if I’d had a flare-up of symptoms recently.  At the time I was doing pretty well and had been in the longest streak of good days I’d had since the SIBO got really bad in December.   She warned of a typical two to three month flare-up that is experienced by a lot of people on SCD.   I finally went back and re-read Chapter 9 of Breaking the Vicious Cycle and found this little paragraph I’d obviously just overlooked the first time through:

Most cases begin to improve within three weeks after the dietary regime has been started and improvement usually continues.  At about the second or third month, there is sometimes a relapse even when the diet has been carefully followed.  This can occur if the person develops a respiratory infection or for no reason at all.  Do not allow this to discourage you!  Once the individual gets over this, improvement is usually steady with minor setbacks occurring occasionally during the first year.

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Real food for once

It has been a little over a month now on my baby food diet.  It started out pretty basic but in the last few weeks has expanded somewhat and that has been great.   First though, we moved in the middle of all this GI mess which is something I would not recommend.  Between the general stress of moving and the amount of activity needed for the move I managed to drop three more precious pounds during the week of the move.  Once we got through the big push I’ve been trying to take it easy, rest more, and shove in more calories than I’m expending each day.  The rest and a bit of added fats have helped and I managed to put back on 1.5 pounds in the last three days.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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