If I hear the words "barium shake" ever again I will barf.

Most disgusting thing I've had to drink: fake "lemonade," not for medical purposes, sorry.

I wonder that they bothered to call it a "shake." As if it would make it more palatable to imagine it was barium + milk or something.

Actually, what was added to the barium? Or is barium liquid.

ah xpost I see. You've got me beat--I was 21 when I had an ulcer.

I had to have one of these for an ulcer about 8 years ago, it was really awful.

That's nothing. Wait until someone hands you an Osmium paperclip.

Also, didn't they find out recently that ulcers were caused by a virus or did I imagine that.

If your stomach cannot empty well on its own, the stomach contents may need to be removed through a special tube inserted through your nose and down into your stomach just before the test begins.

I have a feeling vomiting through one's nostrils is not a pleasant sensation.

Hope all goes well with the ulcer, barium, and related stuff...

I got to have all the colonoscopy fun today, liquid diet yesterday, etc. Anesthesia when you haven't eaten anything in 32 hours is the most terrifying thing ever.

(could I be more condescending? sorry)

I will stop making this about me now. Glad it's only a mild case.

I had to get surgery again and I feel terrible.

i have gone through various surgeries and procedures (i am too well acquainted with the barium shake, my friend, and the "NG TUBE") for my abdominal complications as well, and i know the frustration and pain you must be going through. make sure you get lots of rest and drugs. you poor thing. i found that valerian root extract helped to sedate me when i couldn't take the pain anymore. luckily, you have been diagnosed, so you're on the right track. but you poor thing.

Hi Curtis, I Have crohn's disease too. I've had the barium shake, all the oscopies you can name. I suffered very badly for quite a while and couldn't really eat without getting pain, plus all the other horrible symptoms. was on prednisone, pentasa and now I'm on Immuran. My symptoms tapered off about a year but I still get them every now and again. I saw someone about it for the first time in a while the other day and he basically said "well you MAY be fine now but you're going to have horrible symptoms again for the rest of your life and you will need surgery". This was only a referral for some other completely unrelated surgery I am soon to have!

Anyway, for a while I thought it would never end but then the symptoms suddenly disappeared, even if they DO come back sometime. So this can happen.

Can I ask what surgery you had?

There's this Remicaid thing (something you have to go in and have monthly thru IV) that doctors are talking up. As with all these drugs, it's young and they don't know the side effects yet. I think prednisone really fucked me up and made it hard to do my job. So watch that stuff. There's also THIS INTERESTING NEW STUDY

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/06030101/

Can I ask what surgery you had?

A setonic fistulotomy, same as last summer. Last summer they drained the abscess and plugged it up with a fibrin plug, but a few weeks ago it reabscessed. I'm not nearly as bad off as I was last summer, but upped Flagyl dosage + painkillers = I FEEL LIKE SHIT

How do i shot remicaid?

About 6 years ago, I had recurring symptoms which I determined justified a doctor's visit. Long and short, I had to get a colonoscopy. While I was falling under the influence of the drugz, my doctor asked me "So, how are you feeling?" like they normally do when you are going under general anesthesia. My response: "You know, doc? It feels like a typical Friday." The med students observing and the attending cracked up so much that, after having my rear end scoped and video-documented, the doctor said "The next time you have surgery, try not to be so funny."

Man, I hope everything works out for you ( no puns intended at all ). The expense of continuing care these days is CRAZY.

this stuff isn't that bad, really. for me, at least.

After my appendix burst they made me drink this. On the first attempt I couldn't do it, so they tried to force plastic tubes through my nostrils and into my stomach. Then I decided drinking that putrid fake orange-tasting shit was not so bad.

I have to do one of these next week to find out wtf is wrong with my neckular region and make sure it's not one of these:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/ZenkerSchraeg.gif/230px-ZenkerSchraeg.gif

I've heard the barium horror stories from a friend who had some GI surgery a couple of months ago. Really not looking forward to this :(

the make-yourself-a-waiter's-literal-nightmare diet

the what's-the-point-of-actually-eating diet

i miss food

Okay so I've never had a stomach or bowel exam and I have no idea what my diagnosis is/will be (no insurance for now) but I follow about half of the "fodmap" (gross) guidelines and I can manage all the symptoms that were bothering me and life is better.

The extra restrictions coincided with my finances getting dicey so I've basically completely stopped eating out anyway, and it's very inconvenient to grab a snack anywhere so I have to pack most meals if I'm not at home. No wheat, no un-aged dairy, no beans/legumes (sob because I love beans and lentils), which means no coconut milk because of the guar (;________; but my grocery store has coconut CREAM which is pure coconut with no additives and works fine). I eat any fruits and veg that I desire, still eat chocolate, still drink coffee and booze although not beer because of the wheat, but I didn't like beer anyway, still cover everything in garlic so that seems to be fine.

I can almost completely manage my symptoms on this plan even though it's inconvenient and I miss pasta and pizza and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ICE CREAM. But I can still murder a steak and a baked potato with cheddar cheese if I want to (not that I can afford a steak but w/e) so there are consolations.

Gradually realizing that I was seriously affected by my diet has changed my relationship with food because now a bunch of the things I used to look forward to have become enemies that hurt me. Combined with my financial worries it does get monotonous because I can't treat myself to much past the basics right now, but I can still have Chinese food and sushi in theory, and sheep and goat cheeses seem to be fine so bring on all the bucherolle LIKE RIGHT NOW.

Do you have to follow the whole thing?? Can you re-introduce things and see if they agree with you? Do you cook? I can't imagine trying to eat out most places now, no.

i'm on the whole thing and have to stay on the whole thing for at least another month. the whole idea is to cleanse your entire body of all this shit but it's impossible not to fuck up. i seriously have memorized every food on the planet and whether or not i'm allowed to eat it but i KEEP fucking up. i went out to eat twice, once with friends and once for my dad's birthday and i figured welp the only thing i can eat here is eggs so i'll have an omelet, i did that twice before realizing THEY MAKE OMELETS WITH MILK YOU SHITHEAD. i went out to buy udi's bread but accidentally bought rudi's bread instead, which is gluten free and tastes like ass but ALSO has inulin in it and sometimes honey. and i ate that for two weeks. also my doctor wanted me off red meat and all dairy but i've been eating red meat and parm cheese anyway. i think i can eat parm though.

and another thing is that this is apparently such a new and not-well-known thing that there isn't much good information on it at all. i got the $9 app straight from the university that does all this and its food catalogue is tiny. you have to go by so much conjecture on the internet.

and all this special has-nothing-in-it food is SO EXPENSIVE

i hate it. i think my worst fear is coming true and i've got a problem with (at least) fructans. wheat. garlic. onion! BREAD. i told myself long ago that i'm not gonna change my diet because of these problems, i'd rather just deal with the symptoms than stop eating food cause food is a reason to live. and my problems just seem way more elusive than everyone else's -- i never eat a type of food and have a distinct reaction to it. which probably means my whole diet needs to change. and fuck that, i can just pay someone in an alley to scoop out my insides and replace them with batteries.

i am now making sushi though, so there's that. with special expensive wheat-free soy sauce.

GARLIC. if garlic is somehow what's making me sick i will literally just crawl into a box and wait for death.

also io really the one decent thing i've found as a substitute is like any pasta substitute. whole foods has a ton and if you cover it with enough shit it tastes and generally feels like flour noodles. rice noodles are great. corn flour noodles are ok. of course all the shit you can cover it with is filled with FODMAPs.

Yeah don't even think about garlic intolerance, it doesn't bear contemplation. You can do this for one more month!

You need to hard boil some eggs, make some plain brown rice (I make mine with chicken broth for half the water and salt it heavily and add a couple of threads of saffron) and sautee some eggplant or whatever in bacon grease. I go through an awful lot of broccoli and brussels sprouts and garlic and am fine so there's hope for you after this test period.

I want to try that wheat-free soy sauce. I've had yakitori twice in the past few years, just grilled meat and veg, and both times been REALLY sick and had a lot of pain afterward, so there's SOMETHING in that bastard marinade or the dipping sauce(s).

Life without bread, or with a minimum of bread, is totally possible and not even that bad. Like I said, I miss plates of pasta but I don't miss the bloating and diarrhea and significant bleeding, which is what was happening.

Or stir-fry some chicken and bok choy and ginger!

And chives and the green parts of spring/green onions are SO good, I can still have yellow onions but I often leave them out and I don't even miss them.

lol i've had 5 hard boiled eggs in the past 2 days. i'm amazed i can apparently still eat egg salad/deviled eggs, unless gulden's mustard has onion powder in it, and if it isn't gulden's what's the point.

the thing is i'm not even THAT into sandwiches, but sandwiches are the easiest thing to do on FODMAP minus the bread part. cause i don't really want to cook up a whole thing of meat every meal when i can just get deli meat and toss in some condiments that aren't triggers (i've been eating tons and tons of horseradish. of course there's no information on whether horseradish contains FODMAPs lol). maybe i'll try to do lettuce wraps. yeah. (internally screaming)

wheat-free soy sauce tastes different. heavier, less tangy. i hope it (and broccoli) isn't a problem for me cause if i can never eat cheap greasy pad see ew again i will literally start digging a hole in the ground until i am taken either by exhaustion or heat from earth's core i stg

Also I put honey in my tea like crazy and it doesn't upset my stomach but I do feel much worse the next morning when I have herbal tea and like 2 cigarettes than when I go through half a bottle of wine and half a pack of cigarettes, so maybe there's something to that.

I've evangelized for this meal a bunch of times but just in case you haven't seen any of them, here's what I largely survive on. I make a pot of brown rice and stick in fridge. Then for meals, I break 2 eggs into a bowl and mix with a couple of handfuls of rice. Brown up 1-2 strips of bacon, pouring off extra grease (save for cooking other things in). When bacon is half done, I throw in half a head of broccoli, in florets, and let it crisp up.

While that browns, I crumble a finger of goat cheese and some diced parm into the egg mix, along with minced chives, salt & pepper. When bacon/broc is done, stir all together and either let brown in a pancake shape or toss a couple of times like hash browns for some browned bits. When egg is not wet-looking, top with a diced tomato and eat.

i'm worried about honey but i also went through like a week of eating a straight tbsp of honey every night cause the internet told me it'd cure my reflux (i'm dumb but to be fair i just really like honey and am also disgusting) and i wasn't bowled over in pain that week or anything, there was nothing especially wrong then. the actual instances of torturous pain that i get are so sporadic and never really seem to follow any abnormal meals or anything. i generally don't think this diet is gonna tell me much which makes it harder to do, but that might be angry toddler me talking

xp that sounds good!

Re cooking meat, seriously my roommate is GROSS and cuts raw chicken breasts on his dinner plate with a dull steak knife and then sautees them in a pan with butter and veg and sometimes half a can of diced tomatoes and sometimes curry powder and mustard seeds, and eats it over pasta or boiled potatoes or rice, and EATS IT OFF THE SAME PLATE HE JUST PUT RAW CHICKEN ON, and he never ever gets sick. If you eat the chicken within 3-5 days of either buying or thawing it, you'll never even have to worry about it going off.

Actually bok choy and bell peppers and chicken with garlic broth sounds really really good right now.

Also for a quick hit, I turn to the Trader Joe's beef tamales. They probably contain onion powder so not okay for you now, but possibly after the extreme test period you can ease back into them. Only $3 for two!

Also don't forget corn tortillas, the little ones! Crisped up for sandwich-holding needs.

the funniest part is how nothing on the fodmap diet is actually good for you

i bought corn tortillas and they break as soon as i fold them in the slightest :( especially if i put something slighty wet (chili) in. shitty cheapo expensive whole foods crap.

i am at least thankful for now discovering rice milk and how to make sushi, which i always figured was much harder cause of those $30 sushi-making "kits" they'd sell near the front of borders

just rolled my fourth roll of sushi since last night on the train to health-town choo choo

It has not escaped me that apparently unlimited amounts of protein are just fine with my stomach but more than 2 slices of bread, or sometimes any sweet pastry at all, will make me need to lie down in a dark room within 15 minutes. Like I said, I still eat any fruit or veg that I want, though, and haven't noticed any plus or minus with that. Actually the diet says apples are terrible for you and I eat them very happily, dipped in peanut butter, as a "meal" when I haven't cooked.

I asked some friends from Mexico and they told me which brand they preferred (blue ones from the grocery store on Broadway, apparently) so that's what I use. Freeze the whole pack, lever them off the stack with the tip of a sharp knife when I need 'em. Throw right on the stove over a low low low gas burner. They crack more than flour tortillas but not hopelessly??

Do you put raw fish in your sushi??

from my understanding the whole idea with FODMAP is you're supposed to be sensitive to entire groups so it's interesting you're sensitive to wheat but not garlic or onion or broccoli. maybe ur celiac? or maybe i'm wrong.

i'm looking over my sheet and i had no idea i can't eat cabbage, i'm now having an "oh god have i been eating cabbage at work every day" crisis

smoked salmon. i've been eating a ton of salmon.

salmon that has garlic on top because i feel horrible asking the dude to not give me garlic. who the fuck chooses not to eat garlic?

1. How long have you been doing this?

2. Do you feel any better yet, at all?

3. Oh stop panicking--if you've been been stressing yr body out by refusing to change your diet to deal with health problems, then you've probably got some distance to cover before it calms down. But at the same time, this is not nec all or nothing--taking the stress (or whatever--I don't really know how to refer to this nonsense) off your system by cutting out MOST of the offenders should still help. If someone cut back from a pack a day to like 5 cigarettes a day, that would be a 75% improvement, you would never say not to bother since they're not completely quitting.

Based on my symptoms I suspect it's about keeping things below a certain threshold. Like with galactans (lol seriously? that name) I have zero tolerance--even one serving of beans or lentils will make me sick for two days. But with the fructans, as you say, as long as I cut out most wheat products I can mess around a bit.

i started doing it seriously a couple days after valentines day, when i had my worst attack ever. since then i haven't had any "attacks", which is to say the really really painful shits all night, but that was also my first attack in months, so that doesn't really mean much. for the most part my only real symptom is constipation, which hasn't gotten any better.

i'm starting to think the probiotic is actually working, or something, cause i keep forgetting just how often the attacks came at first.

wet a paper towel and wrap tortilla in it, microwave for 20 secs or so, should "freshen" it up a lil, give some pliability.

going to see a new GI doc tomorrow, haven't been seen since I moved out of state over a year ago. just hoping she doesn't want to run some weird tests, let's stick to a colonoscopy k?

I'm fucking furious right now because my medication (which I'm supposed to take every 10 days and have to order by mail) won't be here on time. My doctor didn't send the prescription that says I need to be on a 10-day schedule rather than a 14-day schedule to the right pharmacy & the pharmacy didn't call me about it till today. I needed to take my dose today but at the very earliest it will arrive Saturday & I'm worried that it actually won't get here till Monday. I'm already feeling sick & I have to go into work early on Saturday morning & I know that my gut will be inflamed and bleeding by then. I normally love my doctor but she seriously screwed me over.

(sorry for TMI)

dude that is so uncool!! Can you call and raise hell and demand some sort of expdition??

the doctors have you in the palm of their hands and they dont really care

it's been expedited as much as possible. there's simply nothing they can do but ship it tomorrow and hope that it gets there by saturday.

btw if abyone ever says "mayeb you need a barium enema" ask if you can have a CT virtual colonography instead

and if they ask if you want a defecography study - look out

btw I started this page in 2007

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defecography

"Caulk gun used for defecating proctogram"

^ lost nurse with wound album

Ugh crut thats horrible, I hope it reaches you asap :/

My baby bro is in hospital at the moment, having gone under general for removal of large infected rectal abcess, the poor bastard is in a lot of pain.I thought of this thread, morbidly enough.

That really sucks crut. Hoping it gets there Sat for you.

Had the follow up visit yesterday to discuss results of this year's colonoscopy a couple weeks ago. Mixed results... The narrow spot in my ilium has gotten less narrow, which is great news bc a stricture is highest on my dnw list ( have been on low fiber low residue diet for 2 years bc of this stricture risk, diet has been really sucky but I'm psyched that it got results) but I have a lot of ileal inflammation, more than 2013 or 2012 showed. Pentasa not giving me all the protection I need apparently. Going on three months of a 'mild steroid' which supposedly will not give me pred-esque side effects.

My insurance no longer covers Delzicol (I took the last dose this morning) or Asacol. Lialda sent me right out of remission after over ten years, (then I found one last bottle of Delzicol that helped). Tomorrow I get to start finding out what Apriso does for me.

Yesterday I noticed what could be the first signs of Dupuytren's Contracture in my left palm. Who knows if there is any relation.

hello suprep my old friend
I really wanna fucking die

that wonderful post-colonoscopy feeling when you get a random abdominal pain and assume you're about to die

would be easier for me if this wasn't possibly how my aunt died, and also if my doctor didn't bolt the fuck out of the building after i woke up because i was his last patient of the day, and if my dad didn't mention how much quicker the process was than my mom's c-oscopy a few days ago

he didnt even remember my dad is the funny thing

doctors scare me