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Subject: Looking for Advice - Stomach Bug

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Evan

Posts:1

Newbie

10/03/2008 1:30 PM	Alert
I've been doing the Zone diet for a week or so now, and have already felt a lot of the benefits that Dr. Sears describes in his book, "Enter the Zone": great mental clarity, great energy, I need less sleep. There's just one problem: last month I traveled to Honduras and ended up getting a stomach bug of some kind. At the risk of being somewhat disgusting, I have been struggling with constant diarrhea for a month and a half now, with no break. I've been to the Dr. multiple times, done two rounds of different antibiotics, been tested for every parasite known to man, tried three different diets...nothing is working. The doctor had me try a liquid diet while I was on Ciproflaxin for two weeks at first, which seemed to make it worse, and I was extremely tired, shaky and irritable from the lack of nutrients and way too many sugar crashes from all the Gatorade. Then I did the BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, white toast) diet for 2 weeks. Again, no change. I guess the principle is that it would be easy to digest, but I've always been very sensitive to carbohydrates (get really tired when I eat pasta), and this diet just made me feel lethargic and awful. And, it didn't stop the diarrhea issue at all. After that they put me on another round of antibiotics with a really difficult to pronounce name that started with an M. At this point, I was pretty desperate for a solution, and at a friend's recommendation bought Dr. Sears' book and have been giving the Zone Diet a shot for a week now. My energy levels are better, and it feels good to be eating fruits and veggies and protein again, but, again, no change at all in my digestion capabilities. Dosing heavily with Imodium AD stopped it for about 2 days, then it came back just as strong. Peptobismol does absolutely nothing but taste awful. Two months ago I weighed 190 lbs. I am now 160. I'm 6'1" tall. This is not good weight loss. I'm going to be going back to the Dr. again this weekend to get a referral to a specialist. But, I wanted to ask the folks on this forum if there's anything else I can try to get myself back together. Has anyone gone through something like this before? I just feel really helpless and want to try something, anything, to get back to normal.

Sue

Posts:4176
Zoner

Zoner

10/03/2008 3:11 PM	Alert
Hi Evan! Sorry you're having this experience! I've been through a similar thing, actually both my daughter (about age 20 at the time) and I. This was about 10 years ago. Our symptoms were a lot of abdominal bloating and gas(it would get even worse everytime we ate), very loose bowels, and feeling drained of energy. It was like being sick all the time, but then again not really sick, and on top of that it would worsen after every meal. This went on all day every day, no matter what we did, what we ate, etc. Nothing we tried helped us feel better and nothing appeared to be causing it. Here’s our story. My daughter had been home from college in May for a couple weeks and then she'd moved to Europe, to do an internship in Scotland. About a month later, in the end of June we happened to tell each other we'd been feeling very sick every day since she’d left for Scotland 4 weeks earlier. When we compared notes, to our surprise all of our symptoms were identical and persistent and had begun a day or two apart from each other. She ended up cutting short the internship and returning to the US earlier than planned. We were tested on multiple occasions for parasites but nothing showed up. It took several more weeks, and finally being referred to an infectious disease specialist, to find out it was a parasite called strongoloides (sp?). The first few rounds of tests had showed no parasites because you had to catch it at the right time in the lifecycle for it to show in the testing. The specialist did more parasite testing and the parasite finally showed up in one test in my daughter. Because we had identical symptoms, he treated us both for this same parasite, even though it still hadn't shown up in my tests. The treatment was a drug called Mintezol (generic name is thiabendazole). It was so rarely used in this part of the country (this parasite is rare here) that the pharmacist had to do a scavenger hunt of sorts and get it from 3 different pharmacies around the state in order to get enough to fill both of our prescriptions. It was nasty stuff and taking it wasn’t fun. It had side effects that really knocked us for a loop for a couple days, but it solved the problem almost immediately for both of us. Then it took about 6-8 more weeks for our systems to feel totally back to normal. We still dont' know how we got them. She had been to Fiji 6 mos earlier, but I hadn't. these parasites usually enter throuth the skin, many times throught the skin of you feet, btu aer not usually found in around whe we live. There was speculation that you could also maybe get them if you ate the larvae, though it would be a rare occurrance to do so. We figure we could have eaten some in some raw fruit or veggies that we ate. I also know of another person who had a puzzling persistent stomach/intestinal problem and was told by doctors that it was all in her head! Turned out that she had parasites too. Keep at it with your docs, and consider getting additional opinions. Someone should be able to figure out what's going on and help you. Good luck! Hope you feel better soon.

sue lost 100 lbs 13 yrs ago, off BP meds, thanks to the Zone diet and Zone fish oil! for more photos, scroll over this photo and click when the link appears

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