Symptomatic with negative toxins?

[Alex1712]

Hi. I had a mild strain of c diff that only caused D once a day, but I was feverish, nauseous, and felt like hell for a week before i was diagnosed.

I was given a 10 day course of Vancomycin. It's been 6 weeks and I've tested negative for toxins 4 times, but my symptoms flare randomly even though I'm on probiotics and a diet of rice and bananas. I mean fever, pulse 100+, exhaustion, frequent and urgent BMs (usually just mucus), appetite so bad i have to set timers to remind me to eat and i feel full after 1 bite...

My PCR test is still positive 6 weeks later. Could i have mild c diff that's just flaring with toxins every few days? Even on my best days my stools are ragged with mucus and i usually have 2-7 a day...still zero appetite and it's often hard to eat. Gaining weight is impossible and I'm down to 95 pounds.

Probiotics seem to help a lot but they're transient. I'm planning on doing a home fmt with my tested friend soon because if this is what "cured" feels like, it's not good enough. I still can't function 6 weeks later.

[beth22]

I had the same thing happen and I did home fmt enemas and saw improvement.

[Rusty S]

The antibiotics used for treatment reduce the quantity/variety of good bacteria along with killing the active C Diff. Unfortunately the recovery afterwards often consists of being prone to digestive upsets and periods of quasi-C-Diff symptoms caused by germinating spores not killed by treatment. This gradually goes away over, I kid you not, the next couple of years. There's a lot of improvement in the first few months as a lot of the flora has been restored, but as far as I understand, it follows the Pareto distribution: 80% of the good bacteria comes back in 20% of the time; then the last 20% you need to get back to baseline takes the remaining 80% of the recovery time. Then sometimes the new baseline doesn't consist of the same microbiome and people end up with a new food intolerance. Fun stuff, huh? But... relapse is relatively common, so it's worth another test if you've had D for more than a few days without it being at least somewhat self-resolving. Best of luck! Plenty of us have been through it, and it rocked my world enough to where I browse to try and provide advice/compassion at least once a week despite it being well over a year since I was treated.