Hi all,
I went back into lurk mode last year, but have been following the board off and on. My thoughts have been with Gaelen and Terry so much lately. Also always happy to see updates from BB. I expect to see him fly by my house on his bike one of these days when he decides to to take a leisurely ride to California.
I'm delurking to call on folks for a bit of advice. I had my first follow-up colonoscopy about 10 days ago -- I had been planning to do it much earlier, but I have a fissure that kept flaring up, plus a couple of colds that morphed into respiratory infections, so it kept getting delayed. (As a side note: the Miralax prep is the way to go!!!)
The news was great: the ol' cancer was still nowhere in evidence! Yay! So all seemed good.
Then a few days later, my fissure flared up WITH A VENGEANCE, and now here I am -- in the worst pain I've had in over a year. The problem was that after the scope, when my digestive track came back "online," I started having 5-6 sticky, thin stools, which is clearly what aggravated the fissure. (Before that, I had gotten to the point of only 2 stools a day -- generally well-formed, and easy to pass, which definitely seemed to be the thing to keep the fissure healed up.)
Last year I tried the MD Anderson approach in the months immediately following my ileo reversal, but I had found by last fall or winter that medicinal fiber really didn't seem necessary, and I was mostly able to control things via diet, making sure to get additional fiber via whole wheat bread/pasta, brown rice, etc. So last week, I thought maybe I should go back to the MD Anderson protocol (1 tsp citrucel + 2 oz. water) to slow things down/bulk things up, but I was very surprised that it only seemed to make things worse -- my stools continued to be frequent and sticky, but then also started getting almost "grainy" and greenish. (Oh, the things we talk about here!!!)
So I went off the fiber, and thought that the Miralax prep might have cleaned out all my "good" gut bacteria (thus the frequent stools), so I took some probiotics (Sustenex) and ate some extra yogurt for a couple of days. That seemed to slow things down starting a few days ago (the percocet I am taking for the pain probably helps on that score, too!), so now it's only about 2 BMs a day, but still pretty sticky and thin, and so still VERY painful to pass.
This has now been going on a week of this flare-up, which is several days longer than they usually last for me. I have been in such pain that I couldn't go to work on Friday (and could only work partial days before that) and have been mostly bed-bound these past few days, with a heating pad on my backside. I am using the dilitiazem gel that one of my doctors prescribed to me last winter (plus the wheatgrass cream that a friend recommended), but I don't know how much good they're doing at this point.
I have a call out to my doc, but in the meantime I'm looking for any feedback or advice. I feel like if I could get back to the formed, regular BMs that I was having before the colonoscopy, that would do a lot to help. I'm basically eating the same foods I was eating when things were going well, so I'm a little mystified on that score. Any thoughts? More probiotics? Am I the only one for whom the MD Anderson protocol seems to have not worked, after working at another time? I'm just getting a little discouraged and scared. Thanks for any help, everyone.