Infection=GI Flare?

Two weeks ago I started to go to the bathroom like 5 times a day, all the food I was eating was going right through me. The whole things was unpleasant to say the least. I was constantly battling dehydration, and barely winning. With Gatorade on my side I survived (on a side note as a child I was only allowed Gatorade when I was sick, so I associate it with stomach bugs). By the end of the week I was a bit concerned and after some telephone tag with my GI's nurse I had an appointment first thing Monday morning.

Gatorade and I have a love/hate relationship.

At my doctors appointment we decided to run a bunch of test. So far only my blood test came back but so far so good. Celiac panel was clean, no signs of ingesting gluten. No indication of Crohn's (which was the worse case scenario). My white blood cells and platelet counts were both low, so the guess at this point is I have an infection and it trigger my regular symptoms to flare. On Monday my GI also advised me to cut out dairy from my diet and if I do eat any to take a lactaid pill. The last thing is I need to cut back on my coffee again (since I triple my Periactin dose a couple weeks ago I have been up to 2-3 cups a day so it was getting out of hand).

Last Friday night I started throwing up, that continued through around Tuesday night. On the bright side the worst was always at night so I still managed to go to all my classes and babysit. Around Tuesday my stomach pain started getting worse, by Thursday it was like a "could barely eat and was having the same pain that sent me to the ER last semester" bad. When I say I was barely eating I mean I wasn't hitting 1000 calories a day. I even had to take a liquid supplement a couple times. Those are really gross, but they still taste better than GI cocktails.

Do not be fooled by the name, it does not taste like a coffee latte!

Thankfully yesterday afternoon I started to feel better, because I don't know if I could have taken much more. Today has been pretty good, it was CHOP Celiac Education Day, but that deserves its own post.

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Life with a Flare

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