I’ve just had a flare up again after 5.5 years.
6 years ago I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis(UC) a couple weeks after eating Sushi in Mexico, that led to ongoing diarrhea. I managed to clear that up in 6 months with Pred, pentasa and living back in my home country with my parents. I also saw naturopaths – all I took from that was to eat pumpkin seeds and healthy things as snacks, which is good.
I stopped all meds, and ate pretty much anything (except milk and cream which bloat me – processed dairy seems fine) for 5.5 years – no problems. During this time, I’ve had diarrhea from a variety of things, but nothing I took as ulcerative colitis related – all went away after a day or two, and never led to the huge urgency or trouble. When I did get diarrhea, I wouldn’t take anything – just let my system naturally flush out whatever it wanted, and I came out ok. during this time, I’ve also gone through my ups and downs of sustained stress. Although I try my best to chill and be aware of it, work sometimes makes stress inescapable. I never did anything routine with exercise, although I could have and should have etc.
Then I got food poisoning or a stomach bug about a month ago. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t UC directly from nowhere, because a number of people at work had it two, some with the same timing, and some a little later. I even seemed to recover faster than some of them, or I’m just a little bit more used to dealing with it.
But after I started feeling a lot better, but not fully solid, I had a really busy patch of packing up my house and moving my job over to Mauritius. It started off with me losing energy, and over a week grew into a clear flare up – blood, cramps etc
I bit the bullet and went to the local docs, who I’m glad to say seem to know all about ulcerative colitis, and now, after two days of Pred and 5ASA, I already feel the inflammation/tenderness/cramping subsiding. I’m almost tempted to cut the Pred short (will check with Doc first, but I’m told it’s ok if you’ve been taking it less than 7 days). That’s how I found this site – searching for something about when/if it’s ok to stop immediately – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prednisone#Dependency for that answer, but check with Doc…
My questions, now that I have a little more energy to think back over the last few weeks are:
1) I’ve only had two flare ups, so quite lucky, but it also means I don’t have much experience preventing a third. Does it make sense to you that the (my) cause can be the combination between severe food poisoning/stomach issues and intense stress?
2) is my attitude toward not taking anti diarrhoea tablets (when I’m in remission) wrong – could this perhaps have stopped the bad stomach short, rather than having it grow over the weeks into a flare up?
3) what do you call a Producer that doesn’t have UC?
Background and Medication Info:
– 5ASA and Prednisone, Pumpkin sees, Flax seeds, some other white one I can never remember the name of
— I used to travel a lot. And not to the tourist destinations. Rather, the ones that don’t have embassies and the jobs pay directly in dollars. That was the stress and possibly diet problem right there.
Since UC, I realized it was time to settle, but that took another two years to come together. After that, I had three years in my home country.
I’ve just packed up again, but to a nice tropical island, so wasn’t expecting any trouble…
submit your ulcerative colitis story and questions here just like Chicken Kiev did
Information about the Ulcerative Colitis Diet called SCD which stands for the Specific Carbohydrate Diet
