Hey have u found out the cause? How’s your cfs now?
CFS is actually worse due to constant infections this past 15 months though i think i figured out the source of each of them, only threat now is likely to be family members in house getting sick as i can't seem to avoid getting it somehow despite my best efforts.
So i went to a Gastroenterologist, he ran a colonoscopy, upper gut scope down to the duodenum, and a small bowel barium xray, the xray showed my small intestine to be fine but the colonoscopy showed colitis, Focal Active Colitis he called it, not crohns or ulcerative colitis. It isn't nearly as severe as the other two but it is definitely something, it also showed the rectum is kinda worse and that's probably the source of the occult blood, there is bleeding sometimes if i strain but it's almost certainly entirely from that area as the recal area hurts, my tissues in general seem very bad at regenerating themselves so that might have something to do with it, dunno if that's hemorrhoids or what, gonna have to ask the doc, we were focused elsewhere last visit.
I'm two months into Mesalamine treatment for the colitis, felt real good the first week but unfortunately the first month i had several infections which completely drained my energy, energy like i had before that is only just coming back to me now it seems. No change in the beige color of the stools anyway.
The upper gut scope showed some antral gastritis of unknown cause, he said usually the only reason to deal with this is if it's causing pain, when CFS came back for me 6yrs ago I was taking perhaps too much betaine hcl, i wonder if that might have caused all this though my health was burning out in any case so maybe not, followed the advice of taking increasing betaine hcl till burning is felt, got up to 9 pills without burning then felt strange tingling all through my body and decided to stop, might have something to do with antral gastritis or even the colitis though i know now the colitis was there before this. I had a colonoscopy done months before my health burned out that showed colitis but i was doing enemas around the time and the images just looked like marks from the enema tube and i didn't go back to see the doc. The new GI doc ive seen pointed out that the diagram only shows it around the rectum but the write up in the report said the colitis was at points much higher that the diagram doesn't have anything pointing to and so didn't include, for all i know the colitis might have been round even before the first long while of cfs years before that first colonoscopy.
A number of people on the yahoo SCD forums mention having had both colitis and very low energy before starting the diet which they say fixed up their colitis and their energy, dunno if they had PEM though, I do have PEM btw.
It looks like this is an old post, but just in case it can still help. The stool color can be a sign of poor fat/food break down. This can point to gallbladder and pancreas issues.
Is it also sticky (smears on the bowl), smellier?
Do you notice more yellow when you meal was a bit fattier?
Have you been checked for gallbladder health, exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI)?
How about an MRI with MRCP of the abdomen?
Any 24 hour fecal fat, fecal fat Distribution, Elastase and Chymotrypsin stool tests completed?
Chymotrypsin blood test?
Have you completed any metabolite and nutritional testing such as Genova Diagnostics FMV, Great Plains Lab Organic Acid Test or Spectracell?
Not sticky or smelly
No change from fatty meals
It's been a while since i had gallbladder and pancreas assessed by ultrasound, what would you suggest besides the MRI with MRCP, never had the MRI by the way and the ultrasound I had done back before this pale stool and most recent form of CFS started 6yrs ago only showed the tail of the pancreas to be slightly smaller than expected/gallbladder was completely fine
Chymotrypsin yes, so i had a Comprehensive Digestive Stool Analysis by genova done, chymotrypsin was low on first one, normalized on second one after i started taking digestive enzymes again, fecal lactoferrin was high on first but normal on second test, occult blood on both which led me to take an immuno occult blood test which was also positive, cholesterol is yellow high on first test, red high on second while all the other things in the absorption catagory are normal(triglycerides, long chain fatty acids, phospholipids, fecal fat(total). Cholesterol was also high on a gi fx test i had done 3-5 years earlier back when my health was in a CFS state but was overall very different.
Don't know if that fecal fat total will count as fecal fat distribution, the gdx test was a 3 day test, dunno if that is equivalent to the 24hr fecal fat type test. no elastase or blood test of chymotrypsin yet.
I have done a Nutreval, gone over it in detail, haven't done much treatmentwise though even though it was two years ago i took it, have had many other things i wanted to test and so many setbacks. Seems like anytime i test two treatments at once lately one of them has some bad side effects and i have to start things all over
