In December I wrote a post about our 30-Day Candida Cleanse because I thought I had developed a candida overgrowth from a round of Doxycycline taken in September/October. The symptoms were tolerable but I wasn’t my normal self starting at the end of October.   The cleanse diet and the supplements seemed to be working and my symptoms were going down, albeit slowly.   What follows is the health epic I’ve been going through for the last month since that post.  This may be TMI for some people but I feel I need to document this whole experience so maybe I’ll keep others from having to deal with it.

Shortly after the post was made I started having some new symptoms,  pain under the right side of the rib-cage and some elimination problems.  I went back to the doctor on Jan 2nd and he thought maybe it was a gallbladder problem due to all the coconut oil and fats I’d been consuming over the cleanse.  On Jan 3rd I went in for an abdominal ultrasound which showed the gallbladder and all other organs were fine aside from a few cysts which should not have been causing any symptoms.   I was told maybe I’d developed gallbladder sludge (I thought he was making it up but it is real) and if the pain persisted to come back.   The last time I had a suspected gallbladder issue it took a few weeks to calm down so it didn’t worry me too much for a few days.  The next week or so the discomfort was about the same, a low level annoyance and nothing I was too concerned about.   I actually even started running again, I wasn’t feeling too bad.

By mid-month the pains in my gut had gotten a bit more bothersome so I made an appointment for the next week.  In between I woke up one morning just feeling bad all over with more churning, burning just below my ribs.  Catherine took me to Urgent Care.  The doctor there pressed on my gut, asked a few questions and told me to go get some Pepsid AC.  He asked if I drank, I said “not since Thanksgiving” and he suggested I start again.  I know he thought I was just being a bit paranoid.   I went back to the doctor I’d been seeing a few days later and he suggested Prilosec thinking it was heartburn.  I never filled the script.   During this few weeks I’d gone from 171 to about 166 lbs which I didn’t think too much of since I’d been running up to 7 miles again.

In the very early morning hours of Jan 18th I was awakened by a lot of gas, churning in my gut and a stabbing pain in the center of my abdomen that radiated outwards. It felt like someone had unleashed a demon in my gut.  I got up and read but the pain persisted.  It settled down a bit by morning and as the day went on and I ate more it built up again making for another very restless night on Saturday night.  I still had an appetite so I tried to keep eating normally (and pretty healthy) but I was dropping 1-2 lbs a day no matter how much I tried to keep eating.  I also found clumps of what looked like dark blood in my stools on Saturday morning. I was pretty scared that all this had not been candida but instead was colon cancer which took my dad at too early an age.

Back in the doctor on Monday morning early.  By this time I was down to 160 lbs and hadn’t slept in days so was a bit crazy, especially since I thought and felt like I was probably dying.   The doctor reassured me that I wasn’t dying of cancer since I wasn’t jaundiced or had swollen lymph nodes but wanted to run a CT Scan just to be safe.  So, for the next two hours I got to site and drink some barium then wait another 45 minutes to get into the machine.  Never had a CT Scan before and was sort of shocked when the contrast dye hit my system and warmed up my neck and butt.  The doc called me at 8 p.m. and said that the CT Scan was mostly normal but that I was constipated in the ascending colon (I warned you this was TMI)  and there was one spot they needed to look at more and he had set up an appointment the next day at Puget Sound Gastroenterology.

Tuesday morning, back at another doctor.  This time I found out that the CT showed a possible lesion on my sigmoid colon so they wanted to schedule a sigmoidoscopy (colonoscopy lite) to check that out.   I asked why not a full colonoscopy since the scan showed issues on the right side but they said they were mainly interested in the possible lesion.  Of course they couldn’t get me in until Feb 5th.

I didn’t want to wait several more weeks to find out if something was serious so I began calling around trying to get an appointment sooner.  I found a doctor at Overlake who could consult on Wednesday and do a procedure in Thursday, I grabbed the appointment.  He agreed that doing a sigmoidoscopy was short-sighted and if that came back OK then I’d still be looking at a full colonoscopy.  He set me up with prep and sent me home to clear my system out over the next 24 hours.

Thursday I was back at Overlake and had the colonoscopy.  The potential lesion turned out to be nothing, probably the bowel moving when the CT took the image.  There was a single polyp in the ascending colon which was removed and sent to biopsy but is probably just a polyp like the ones were three years ago.   After the prep was done I actually felt good for the first time in days, no cramping or pains in the abdomen.  This was a definite clue as to what was going on.

Got home and had some lunch.  A few hours later my guts started acting up and by evening I was in full blown attack mode again and was woken up by pain.  On Friday morning I was back at my primary care sick as before.  Down to 158, argh.  He re-iterated that this is probably a ruined gut from the doxy and didn’t have much to offer aside from a few other tests.  We ran a breath test for H.Pylori and sent me home with a stool test (again, TMI).

I’d been doing a bit of reading over night and found something called SIBO – Small Intestine Bacteria Overgrowth that seemed to fit the symptoms and the fact that I seemed to only get sick when I ate.  If there was no food, I felt pretty good but as soon as food got somewhere in my gut I was in pain, my gut was churning, my tongue turned white, and I emitted nasty gasses and odorous sweat.   My doctor didn’t seem to think it was SIBO but more colon flora causing the problem.

When I got home I called PS Gastro again to let them know that I had the colonoscopy and it was clean so to cancel the sigmoidoscopy.   They called back a few hours later and in talking to the nurse there she agreed that SIBO was quite possibly the culprit, I didn’t think they’d believe in it since it is one of those weird syndromes like CFS.  Turned out they could even do the hydrogen/menthane breath test at their offices.  This test checks the breath to find out when gasses start being emitted from the bacteria, that way you know if it is in the small intestine, where it shouldn’t be, or in the colon.  You also know how high up in the small intestine it is if it happens to be there which has ramifications for what you can actually digest before the bacteria get to it and eat it before you get a chance at it.  This explains the weight loss, the bacteria were eating all my nutrition and then shitting toxic gasses into my system.

In the meantime, Catherine was telling a friend about this whole experience and her husband, who is a doctor, was evidently very skilled in this area.  So, I got an appointment with him at the end of the day.   I went to see Steve and the it was a totally different experience than the other doctors.  Instead of 15 minutes of time I was there for about 1.25 hours.  Steve listened to the entire history of this starting last October and felt that it was quite possibly still candida with maybe some bad bacteria thrown in the mix too.  After doing some manual manipulation he found that my valve between the small and large intestine was working and that things seemed to be physically in OK shape.   I left there with another test kit to check stool and saliva for candida and bad bacteria.

When all this got severe Catherine had picked up a book, The Inside Tract, by Dr. Gerard Mullin.  The book made reference to SIBO and after taking the GPS test yesterday morning I decided that I needed to be on the very restrictive Tract 3 diet for a while to keep the symptoms at bay.  So, I went back to very minimal food for the day – eggs in the morning, some sardines at lunch and  salmon and steamed zucchini with a small bit of white rice for dinner (white digests further up the GI tract so if the bugs are deep then the body will get to it first.)   I kept the symptoms at bay all day this way and managed to sleep through the night last night without any pain.  So far, so good today too.

So where am I?  I’m sticking to the Tract 3 diet right now, protein and very digestible vegetables and some white rice.  I managed to hold steady with weight, albeit way low, last night for the first time in a while so that is good.   I went to Whole Foods this morning and bought the Tract 3 shopping list then went home and made an Inside Tract Smoothie (which was pretty darn good) and started a big pot of the Inside Tract Broth using carrots, parsnips, turnips, sweet potato, celery root, shitakes, kombu, ginger and parsley.  Steve wants me to make bone broth too which is kind of a turn-off but I’m willing to try it,  and drink marshmallow root infusion. My vegan and even vegetarian days are definitely behind me at the moment since I can’t eat soy, other legumes are brown rice right now.  Needless to say, I’m not running at the moment but am still getting outside and walking so I’m not just sitting or lying around all day.

Testing over the next week or two should identify what the heck is going on and where.  If it is candida still then I can go with a prescription compounded anti-fungal medication.  If it is bad bacteria in the colon it will be mega-doses of probiotics.  If it is SIBO then I have a big decision to make – try and kill it naturally with diet and herbal antibiotics or pull out the nuclear arsenal and take another series of antibiotics that are being used fairly successfully for SIBO and IBS.  Luckily they are not systemic antibiotics and stay in the gut so they aren’t as scary as the doxy was but I’d have to do more research.   Stay tuned, the story will continue to unfold…