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.

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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.

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After my meeting in Portland with Dr. Siebecker on Feb 6th I was pretty confident that I was going to be able to kick this thing in short order.   We had arrived in Portland on the 5th and I found out that my breath test came back positive for SIBO and that it was all methane producing bacteria that were present but a low level of them.  The treatment protocol that Dr. Siebecker, Puget Sound Gastro and Dr. Pimental from Cedar-Sinai all agreed upon was 10-14 days of a mix of 1650mg Xifaxan and 1000mg of Neomycin.  The dual combo was needed to fight the methane producing bugs.

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