# SIBO Sufferer



## rngustafson (Mar 8, 2015)

I am a 29 year old female. I've had SIBO for about 25 years and just found out a few months ago. I've always had stomach problems. I remember telling my mom that my stomach hurt all the time when I was younger and she just thought I was whining and never did anything about it. I suffered with this pain my entire life not knowing what it was. When I moved out of my parents house and onto my own I started going to doctors to see if they could tell me why I always had stomach pain. They always asked me if I noticed the pain come after I ate certain foods. I told them no because it seemed to hurt no matter what I ate. Every doctor I saw just told me I had IBS. I researched it enough to know that IBS wasn't the main problem. None of the doctors that I saw ever did any testing to see what was wrong with me. They just assumed that after speaking with me for about 5 minutes that they knew what my problem was. After years of seeing doctors and getting the same answer I just gave up. I just figured that I was going to have to live with this pain my entire life.

As I got older the pain got worse and happened more frequently. I didn't know what to do. Doctors weren't helping me and trying to do research online was hopeless. There are so many illnesses that have to do with the gut and with the symptoms I was having it seemed like I had most of them. My husband felt so hopeless watching me curled up on the couch crying in pain. Especially when we didn't know why I was having such bad pain. I would be fine one minute and the next minute my stomach would bloat so bad that my stomach went from flat to looking five months pregnant within seconds. It felt like all of my insides were being squished because there was too much air that couldn't escape. I could barely breathe because every time I would take a breath of air in it felt like my insides were being squished even more. I always noticed that once I was able to get the air out I felt much better. I was always afraid that whenever I got pregnant the air would squish my baby







. That might sound weird but that's what I thought. However; when I got pregnant with my first child I noticed that I didn't have the stomach problems as much. Usually the pain would happen at least once a week. When I was pregnant it only happened a few times throughout the entire pregnancy. I was eating a lot healthier and I assumed that's why the pain wasn't happening as much. Immediately after my daughter was born I had major life-threatening complications and lost a lot of blood. I had 23 blood transfusions and it took me about 3 months to heal from what happened. With my husband and I concentrating on me getting better and having a new baby to take care of my healthy diet kind of went out the window. We didn't have time to cook healthy meals since I was pretty much instructed to sit on the couch for the first few months after I had my baby. When my daughter started eating food my husband and I started eating really healthy again to be a good example for her. That lasted for about a year and the pain didn't happen as often. I got pregnant again and the last few months before my son was born I was chasing a 2 year old around and I was always tired so again the healthy diet went out the window. I didn't have the energy to make dinner after taking care of my daughter all day. So there were a lot of quick meals that weren't as healthy. After eating like this I noticed that the pain was coming back. This time it was a lot worse. Instead of happening once a week it was every night. I had runny stool for about 2 months before my son was born and it lasted for about 7 months after (when I started to cure the SIBO). I didn't know what to do.

I started seeing a Naturopathic doctor that was doing PRP (Platelet Rich Plasma) injections in my back and neck because of pain I've been having for years. Getting this type of injection is supposed to be painful but for me it was extremely painful even though I consider myself to have a high pain tolerance. After the first couple rounds of shots I told my doctor that they didn't seem to be working very well since the pain didn't seem to get better. PRP generally works wonders for most that get the injections, including my husband who was doing them also, but they didn't seem to help me. So my doctor tried something different. She gave me an IV of magnesium to loosen up my muscles and then injected some kind of anesthesia to help relieve some of the pain. Those shots were also very painful for me. My doctor said that she wasn't anywhere near a nerve or bone so they shouldn't be as painful as they were for me. She told me that she thinks I have a lot of inflammation in my body and that could be causing the pain. She asked me if I was eating any food that I may be allergic to, which can cause inflammation. I told her that I wasn't allergic to anything. She decided to do blood work to see where my hormones were. It came back showing that my hormones were all out of whack and I was very low in vitamin D. So I had to start giving myself vitamin D injections and she prescribed some other things to fix my hormones. A couple of weeks later I wanted to do a juicing cleanse for 2 weeks to clean out my body and hopefully lose the last of the baby weight. I did it for one day and felt so sick. I happened to see my naturopathic doctor the next day for something and mentioned to her how sick I was feeling from the juicing and she thought that I may be anemic with how I was explaining my symptoms. She took some blood and tested for anemia. It came back showing that I had iron deficiency anemia. So then I went on iron supplements to bring my iron levels up. After about 5 weeks of being on injections and supplements we tested my blood again and it didn't show much improvement. None of my levels changed much. Of course my husband, who was also giving himself vitamin D injections and taking supplements for his issues, his blood results showed that all his levels were in normal range. UGH!!!!! During that visit after going over my blood results I casually mentioned to my doctor the stomach issues I was having. I never mentioned it to her before because I had kind of given up on trying to find an answer to my issue. My husband made me ask her about it. After her asking me a couple of questions she said "you might have SIBO". I was like "what the hell is that?". I had never heard of it. She sent me home with a test kit to take the breath test and send to the lab. A week later she had me come to her office and she told me that I did have SIBO. She prescribed me Xifaxan for 10 days and Erythromycin for 3 months. I just started this at the beginning of this year. So I'm just over 2 months in. Since we started treating the SIBO we've found a lot of other issues that I have or have had that have been caused by it.

We found that I am deficient in pretty much every nutrient and mineral. I have leaky gut that was caused by the SIBO. And the leaky gut caused a ton of inflammation throughout my entire body because my body was fighting any food that got into my bloodstream and making me have an allergy to it. We think the inflammation is what's causing my back pain that I randomly got about 5 years ago. I've had MRI's and seen neurologists and they couldn't find the cause of my back pain. I've also had several random medical issues throughout my life that didn't seem to have a cause or have anything to do with each other and after doing research about SIBO and what it can cause, I got most of those medical issues as a result of what the SIBO did to my body.

With me having SIBO for about 25 years, it really destroyed my body. I've always felt kind of sick and didn't know why. I've seen several doctors over several years and never got an answer to my problem. I randomly mentioned it to my naturopathic doctor and she knew what it was within a minute. She took the time to ask the right questions and do the test for it when no conventional doctor did. I asked her what could have happened to me if we didn't catch this when we did. She told me that with how long I've had it and what my blood results showed I would have osteoporosis within 5 years and if I happened to get some kind of cancer or other disease my body would never have been able to fight it off, even with medical intervention. Which terrifies me because I'm only 29 and have a husband and 2 young children. She did tell me that since I'm still young we should be able to treat and heal most of my body but it may take a couple of years. Right around the time that I got diagnosed with SIBO, about 2 1/2 months ago, I started to see some external effects it was doing to my body. I was getting bruising everywhere that wouldn't go away, which was from a vitamin K deficiency, my body has gotten "puffy" because I probably have an allergy to everything that I eat on some level because of the leaky gut, my skin has started to get red especially in my face, I have absolutely no energy, etc....

So for treatment I took Xifaxan for 10 days, Erythromycin for 3 months, since I'm not absorbing any nutrients or minerals from the food I'm eating since my intestinal lining is destroyed I have to get them through IV's which I get once a week, I eat a very strict diet, which includes less than 30 carbs per day, for a year which seems impossible, and take probiotics. And at the end of this month my doctor is going to give me some natural antibiotics to help kick what's left of the SIBO. Then she'll re-test to see where I'm at and at the same time she's going to do an IGg food allergy test to see if I'm showing any major allergies to any foods. The diet is so hard. There is no diet specifically for SIBO. There's just a combination of the FODMAPS, GAPS and SCD diets. I've come to terms with the fact that I have to get all these treatments and eat a strict diet for a year, but I'm having a really hard time with recipes. I'm so tired of eating the same things all the time. Even foods that are really healthy for you I can't eat because they're highly fermentable. The diet is so limited and my husband is also getting tired of eating the same things all the time. He's trying to be supportive and do this with me, although he does cheat a little, mainly because he doesn't need to be on such a low carb diet.

I am optimistic that when the SIBO gets resolved that most of my other medical conditions with go away since they all seem to have been caused by the SIBO in some way.

Does anyone have any recipes that are specifically for SIBO? I've tried recipes from sibodietrecipes.com, but they're just a combination of other diets and not specifically for SIBO and I find that some of the recipes still irritate my stomach.


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## Knyttet (Oct 21, 2013)

I can relate to a lot of what you've gone through. I suspect I have SIBO but have not been tested or treated for it, yet. I'm glad you finally got a right diagnosis and help! The diet for SIBO are really tough but I'm sure it's a really important part in healing from SIBO. But people seem to be of different opinions regarding what diet is the right one, obviously it depends a lot on the person. Some say that a low fod map diet is enough, and that one is not too strict. Have you found some relief on SCD/fod map/gaps? If you want to get more ideas on what to cook, I would recommend looking up paleo/scd/gaps food accounts on instagram. There's a lot of people posting their meals daily, and there's a lot of yummy stuff out there. For example, I follow these: sibowithhope, lowfodmapliving, HEALING_FAMILY_EATS .

Then there's this e-book for sale online with meal plans for a fodmap free, autoimmune paleo diet, accustomed to treating SIBO and IBS. I've actually bought it while I was following the AIP diet, but I've never dared to try them because I can't tolerate almost any veggies at the moment. But the recipes seem quite good.

I wish you all the strength and positivity to help you adhere to your diet and continue healing


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## awaitressnolonger (Sep 15, 2015)

Have you had any relief from your symptoms since doing the treatment?


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