It's time for the follow-up to report on how Isaac's week was following his last bloody stools last week. As a recap, we guessed it was traces of soy in some new toasted oat cereal, cut it out of the diet, and then waited to see what happened. We cut out the new cereal after Friday, and Saturday he still had a little bloogie at the end of his bowel movement.
Sunday was immediately better, blood-wise, although the poop was still a 6,7 Bristol-wise. He had a second bowel movement that was hardly worth mentioning--just two little turds, except that they were small little #5 UC turds, which are more like, I don't know, small soft squeezed pooplets.
(If you think we need an exact poop vocabulary, I agree and you're probably right. Here's something the Japanese classify:
unpi 「うんぴ」 : Diarrheal stool. Could be connected to overeating, having a cold, or stress. It is usually a yellowish-color and it has a very strong smell.
unnyo 「うんにょ」 : Soft and tender poop, but not diarrehea. It comes out when you are feel some indigestion. Yellow-ish or light brown in color.
unchi 「うんち」 : Nice poop. It comes out when you’ve been eating healthy balanced meals. It has a clean brown color and doesn’t smell very much.
ungo 「うんご」 : Comes out when you’ve not been eating enough vegetables, and you’re probably constipated when you squeeze out an ungo. Ungo is dark black and really stinky.)
Monday also had two bowel movements. Both were 5,6s. The first was bloodless, but the second had some blood. Tuesday we also saw some blood and a total 7 diarrhea stool. We also started back in with some L-glutamine and acidopholus on Tuesday (before that Isaac was having only sacchromyces boulardii every day in addition to his prescribed sulfasalazine) On Wednesday, an improved bowel movement, with the tiniest fleck of blood visible. Thursday, also blood just visible. Friday, the best stool in a week, #3 at the start, but the movement ended up with a #6, but no blood. And today he had two pretty bad 6,7 stools, but no blood at all to be seen.
Also, about last night and this morning, Isaac indicated he had a belly ache. Since he almost never expresses this, we take it pretty seriously, although it seemed to resolve with a little food and drink.
To our dismay, this evening Isaac found little sister's cup of honey oaties (the cereal with the traces of soy that has seemed to start this episode) and helped himself to four of them before we stopped him. It illustrates some of the challenge of having soy products in the home and also of reasoning with a two year old about what he can and cannot eat, and of course, about parenting in general.
Our take? Well, my thoughts are that we have another flare-up of inflammation triggered by the soy food. Although we removed the soy from exposure in his gut, I think his inflamed response has lingered but is in the process of healing.
I am looking into the amino acids of glutamine and lysine. Lysine has really seemed to help quickly resolve mouth ulcers I've had in the past, and it seems like these free form amino acids are reported to do well in the gut. We'll chat about that with the doctor at our Monday appointment.
For some reason we had also slacked off on the sacchromyces capsules for the three days leading up to this episode.
We are hoping that this is positively indicating that we can handle small reactions and that Isaac's body will respond well if not normally in order to "get back on track". However, it has been a week, and we still had bad stools today, even if they aren't bloody, so we'll continue with our observation over the next week and see if we can't give a fuller report.
We also have a doctor's appointment on Monday. Hopefully he will be of similar mind. He doesn't have much of a response whenever we mention that we've linked Isaac's bowel health to soy avoidance.
And to be fair, our soy observations may be only part of a big picture we have yet to realize. This is another item we've been taking seriously this past week. Partly because an author of another UC blog we follow died this last month, bringing to the forefront of our mind the full threat of the mortality of IBD. And this whole last episode made us really second guess... "traces of soy really has such an effect on Isaac's bowels?" "Okay, how long is he really going to make it before stronger meds and/or surgery, etc....?"
his butt skin must be sore! -aT
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