# Post-appendectomy IBS



## rmiller1985 (Sep 13, 2011)

Hi all. I've been aware of this forum for a couple of years now, and have posted a few times. I thought it was about time I shared my story. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has a similar story.

I started on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet a couple of months ago. It was a difficult transition, as I had been a vegetarian for over 20 years, and the SCD is almost impossible as a vegetarian, at least initially. I've been blogging about the process at http://omnivoreoncemore.blogspot.com, and the first several posts have a fairly detailed explanation of how I got here. Here's the slightly shortened version:

I've always had a wonky gut. I was the kid with the "nervous tummy." I pooped normally more often than not, but it always seemed like a little bout of diarrhea was always just around the corner. I believe this is due to the fact that I was always sick with a cold or sore throat or ear infection practically right out of the womb, and, being a child of the 60s, I was given antibiotics over and over and over again.

As I got older, my family started believing that I was allergic to milk, so I went from whole milk to skim milk to no milk at all at some point. This seemed to help, so the hypothesis was deemed proven, but it certainly didn't stop occasional bouts of diarrhea.

I continued to learn more about which foods seemed to cause the most problems, and by the time I was an adult I had pretty much adjusted to my body. I didn't realize, though, how much mental energy I was spending on the topic: always knowing where the nearest bathroom was (I think I still know the locations of the all the restrooms in Disneyland better than most Disneyland employees!), planning meals around the day's activities so that I could allow sufficient time to see how the meal was going to sit before having to be in a meeting or in a car, etc. Still, life was not bad.

In my mid- to late-20s I became a vegetarian for reasons that had nothing to do with my gut. I don't remember the change having much of an impact on my bathroom habits; over the years I felt as though my symptoms decreased slightly, but this may just be due to wishful thinking or becoming more accustomed to my body.

One thing that was very noticeable was that I seemed to get food poisoning far more often than my friends. Nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, more diarrhea, another bout of vomiting, and 24 hours later I'd be normal (except for the splitting headache caused by dehydration). This usually happened once every year or two, sometimes more often.

In late 2010, I had a bout of what I thought was food poisoning, but it was different than most: I was a tiny bit nauseated but never vomited, and for a week everything I ate gave me diarrhea. This had happened once many years earlier, but not since that I can remember. Three months later, the same thing happened, and this time there was pain involved on the right side of my lower abdomen. It wasn't excruciating, so I just assumed it was a stomach ache associated with the food poisoning. But three months later it happened again, and the pain was more intense, so I saw a gastroenterologist. As soon as he pressed in at McBurney's Point and I winced loudly, he sent me to the emergency room; later that night my appendix was removed after a surgeon verified that it was inflamed via a CT scan.

I was so hopeful at that point. I was thinking, "My appendix! It's been my appendix all along! Since I was a kid, the reason my gut hasn't worked normally is because I've had a faulty appendix!" But after I got home from the hospital and the opiate-induced constipation wore off, I had diarrhea. Serious diarrhea. And a fever. A week after the operation I went to an urgent care facility where they checked a bunch of stuff via blood and stool tests; within a few days they reported that everything looked fine. I went through another round of tests with my gastroenterologist, and they all came back negative as well. So much to my dismay, it appeared that I had it exactly backwards: instead of my appendix being the cause of all my gastrointestinal woes since childhood, it was apparently the only thing holding my gut together. And once it finally gave out, my gut was on its own, free to give me diarrhea full-time.

I tried many things over the next six months. I finally settled on 1mg of Loperamide (that's one half-tablet of Immodium) twice a day. That seemed to decrease my symptoms about 80%; unfortunately, it still left me worse off than I had been, so knowing bathroom locations and planning meal times became even more of an obsession. I do recognize, though, that it's also a very low dose of Loperamide, so I realize that I'm lucky my symptoms aren't worse. My heart goes out to everyone who suffers with this beast and all of its kin, and who have to take much more Immodium or other drugs than I did.

After about a year, I decided that it wouldn't hurt to get a colonoscopy, since I was only a year away from 50. As expected, my colon looked 100% fine. To me, that was the final medical testing route, and it was a dead-end.

Around that time I bought Breaking The Vicious Cycle by Elaine Gottschall. I read it and the hypothesis sounded valid, but I could see that going the route of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet would be very difficult as a vegetarian. So I tabled the idea, since my wife and I were moving soon and were under a lot of stress: around the time that I had my appendix out, my wife had also started in with her own health crisis, constant migraine pain, which continues to this day, almost two years later.

Finally, earlier this year, I decided to try a vegetarian version of the SCD. After 10 days or so, I gave up: I was always hungry, and while my symptoms seemed to improve for the first couple of days, they were soon back as they had been.

A few months later I decided to give in and go back to a meat-based diet so that I could try the SCD in earnest. After over 20 years, this was not an easy decision to make. But I figured it was close to my last option as a way for me to take back my health.

After two months, the results are promising. I'd hoped to be further along by now, with no diarrhea at all, but, unfortunately, I'm still having some issues. Still, all in all, I think I'm better off than I was six months ago. I'm definitely learning as I go, and I hope to continue to improve.

So that's my story. Thanks for reading!

Rich


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