Recovery vs relapse

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phir91
New User
Posts: 27
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2020 6:23 am

Recovery vs relapse

Postby phir91 » Fri May 15, 2020 2:40 am

Hello everyone!

I am really sorry because I feel I keep posting as of late! It’s so helpful to read all the messages on here and I definitely feel less alone. Today should be a pleasing day for me.. I have hit the 1 month mark post vanco after failed flagyl after only a few days...

The problem is for about the past week I have only had one BM a day that has been a bristol stool 6! I don’t have any other symptoms other than a rumbling tummy. I am just not sure if it’s normal to start everyday with one bout of diarrhoea. I’m scared this is the spores coming out and that they are winning.

I am taking vitamins and probiotics (careful not to take too many).. I have also cut out dairy to see if that has made a difference but it doesn’t seem to have!

What are people’s thoughts? Am I headed to the dreaded relapse or am I in the worry spiral?

BetsyS
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Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Jan 08, 2020 10:33 pm

Re: Recovery vs relapse

Postby BetsyS » Fri May 15, 2020 9:06 am

Congratulations on making the one month mark! I could have written your post two months ago. Have a visit with your Dr; my ID assured me mine was post infection IBS. She liked the 3 day rule advocated on this site, and told me to keep following it. I just keep telling myself the time to worry is when I hit day 3, which hasn't happened yet.

Everyone heals differently. I seem to be stuck in the 7 to 5 range on the Bristol scale most of the time, and I am very careful with my diet. My ID told me it is going to take months for my gut to heal because of the circumstances surrounding my illness. She discharged me 1 month after my taper, but recommended I follow up with a GI on IBS, which has been difficult to schedule with COVID. I finally got a referral a couple of days ago.

Ali-Mar
Long Time Contributor
Posts: 463
Joined: Sat Mar 21, 2020 4:17 pm

Re: Recovery vs relapse

Postby Ali-Mar » Fri May 15, 2020 11:50 am

congrats on making to one month, that is great. I would avoid mulitvitamin that contain Calcium during the recovery/post antibiotic, based on the following study the Calcium supplement makes the spores to germinate and come out

https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/calc ... -treatment
Male 54, contracted C-Diff on Feb 5, 2020, diagnosed on March 2nd, Took Flagyl for 8 days, Vanco for 10 days, relapsed 5 weeks post-Vanco. finished Dificid Taper on June 20 relapsed two weeks later, had the FMT on July 14th, 2020

Rusty S
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Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2018 3:23 pm

Re: Recovery vs relapse

Postby Rusty S » Fri May 15, 2020 12:47 pm

PHIR91
I posted this in a recent thread titled "PI IBS" but it may help you some...

Diet: When you're recovering from C Diff, food intolerances are normal (as I assume you may know already). While the common culprits are lactose and gluten, foods that previously caused digestive upset may do so even more now. New random foods may contain ingredients that give you trouble, too. Keep watch on caffeine; it'll excite your colon (I stick to having a full stomach first now, which helps a lot). My understanding is this is all a result of the gut flora being imbalanced and having less biodiversity as a result of treatment.

PI-IBS: So, IBS, in general, is really a set of symptoms which last for a specific period of time, if I understand correctly. While there's logically a cause/effect with *something* going on in the body, more than a couple of times I've seen it used as a catch-all for when the root cause is undefined. In the case of C-Diff though, my understanding is the "PI-IBS" is a symptomatic manifestation of the damage to the gut flora that 1) allowed CDI to happen in the first place; 2) results from the antibiotics used to treat the infection; and 3) caused an inability to process food the same while you spend the next few years rebuilding your microbiome.

Recovery Symptom Ambiguity: Quite possibly the most frustrating part of this ordeal is the fact that the PI-IBS symptoms so closely mimic CDI itself for the aforementioned reasons; and because people will test positive on a PCR test while recovering, if I were to connect the dots, subsequent additional antibiotic treatment further deteriorating the biodiversity of the gut microbiome is what may be responsible for the increased likelihood of subsequent relapse. Now, Beth22 recently replied on a thread of mine ("How Long Before Toxin Test During Recovery" if you wanted to read it) that doctors are now accounting for this and only considering you positive if you're testing positive for toxins and have symptoms consistent with CDI. I'm not sure of the sensitivity of the test, but I'd logically think if you still had spores present (to my knowledge the now-deprecated Flagyl and current-first-line Vanco don't kill them) you may test positive intermittently when they germinate... but don't quote me on that. This is my assumption of why the "three day rule" or "3x3" rule is a good litmus test. Digestive upsets are common for a few years after being treated with antibiotics for CDI, and Gastroenterologists and Infectious Disease Specialists have to carefully weigh the risks vs benefits with each round of treatment as a result.

Probiotics: So, another thing I can tell you from personal experience is there *are* probiotics that can make the situation worse. When I first had really mild symptoms, my maiden voyage into randomly picking up a probiotic that looked convincing from the grocery store shelf had me going to the bathroom 10+ times per day and resulted in my initial C-Diff test. On the other hand, Florastor has helped more than its hurt. Not all probiotics are equal for this.

Best wishes!
Last edited by Rusty S on Tue May 19, 2020 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

phir91
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Posts: 27
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2020 6:23 am

Re: Recovery vs relapse

Postby phir91 » Sat May 16, 2020 4:30 am

Thanks for the replies - cdiff has truly turned me into a crazy person!! BetsyS it’s nice to know that other people have experienced similar symptoms and haven’t relapsed! I will just have to take day by day and hope that as I get through the weeks things get a bit better.

Instead of hassling my Dr, I spoke to my uncle who is a GP (nothing like talking to family about bowel movements)! He said to sit tight.. he said don’t get any stool tests because I will likely test positive and if someone tries to give me more antibiotics without things being really bad it could make things worse ... which seems to be popular opinion from posts I have read.

Thank you for the info on PI-IBS Rusty! This sight has absolutely been a god send - you are all a god send.. I think without it I definitely would have been doing all the wrong things!... still nuts though unfortunately, that probably won’t change for a while...!


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