Good morning all,
My surgery experience won't help you but I still thought I may be able to give some suggestions since I had a long history of irritable bowel syndrome as well as I have treated many patients with abdominal pains with frequent loose BM's (bowel movements) or frequent diarrhea or a combination of the two. Of course, if your symptoms persist over next few weeks to months, I recommend a follow with your colorectal surgeon or your gastroenterologist. My suggestions are rather simple and same type of conversation have been floating around this forum for years, I believe.
- Basics like being well hydarated and doing regular exercises for healthier bowel movement should go without saying.
- Daily stool softeners fiber product, like Citrucel, Benifiber, and Metamucil with fluids and slowly titrating the dose as need to bulk-up the stool to result in few BM's daily that is not too loose and not too hard. Everyone gets individual response and your extensive colon resection makes these supplements' effects a little more unpredictable in my mind. But they are cheep and the surgeons do recommend these trial. BTW, lots of people like to use Metamucil, but it can cause more gas symptoms that may improve with time. For me, I prefer Citrucel.
- Daily probiotics. I just eat Greek yogart daily, but lots of patients have given favorable reports to Align and Floraster and many other products, but I have not tried them personelly.
- While suffering from bloating, gas and other abdominal pain, and BM problem of diarrhea and/or constipation, I recommend avoiding other dairy products; with diarrhea, I would recommend avoiding fresh vegetable, high fiber food, fruit peels and nuts ( sounds familiar?
) Here's the link to Low-residual diet fro MD Anderson:
http://www2.mdanderson.org/app/pe/index ... c&docid=34- Once several weeks have passed where you notice any improvement in your symptoms, then continue with the walking, being well-hydrates, with the probiotics of your choice, and with the stool fiber product, and now start introducing slowly, a small amount of food that is on the side of "Food to Avoid" from the above MD Anderson website. It's all a trial and an error process and also re-training your bowels.
- The goal is to be where you aren't bothered by frequent abdominal discomforts and you are no longer needing to focus/be fixated/have life activities and social outings limited by these symptoms. You intestines have been through a lot and may never be the same as they were precancer and pretreatments, but I believe above regimental trial should help some or even significantly for some of you.
Good luck!