In 2010 we got a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis for our son Isaac who was then 27 months old. For a year and a half we had been concerned about his persistent soft stools. Now that we're going down the road of living with IBD in our house, we want to be able to share our story, connect with similar families or individuals, and increase our awareness of the experience of others.

Some of our related interests are diet, kids and families with IBD, and discussing and sharing experiences.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

roids and so on

We started steroids today, and I just have an awful feeling about it. Also today we took a step back in our diet. The last week has been a lot of digression in poop habits, and it was the week we re-introduced meat and cheese. Also we ran into a bunch of convincing information about animal proteins and UC.

The other medicine Isaac is on is something a lot like aspirin, which is made to specifically target the colon with anti-inflammatory action. Actually, I'm not that bothered by that. There is lots of long-term aspirin research out there and it just isn't that scary. However, for a reason not clear to me, this particular drug also contains a sulfa drug to administer the 5-ASA (the sulfa drug binds to it until it reaches the colon, where something about the colon-specific environment breaks down the connection and absorbs the 5-ASA). There are other drugs that do it differently. What bothers me is that the sulfa drug is an antibiotic, so it's got to be killing all the probiotics we're attempting to grow in that colon-specific environment, no? I'm waiting to hear from the doctor on that one. It might be that dosing a 13kg tyke is tricky (the non sulfa drug uses a pH coating which allows it to get to the colon before breaking down--but Isaac's dose is probably .2 or .25 the usual minimum dose).

We did see a small solid turd tonight, which is such a rare sight we can barely wait until the morning to see what else might come out of Isaac's colon.