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.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Healing Without Steroids

Without steroids, this is what we experienced. The same number of days of bloody stool, which has seemed to resolve itself. For the past few weeks we have been bloodless, with poops improving in consistency until now, where everything is as good as it's been, which are nice healthy 2s and 3s (by Bristol) once everyday or every other day. What we observed is practically the same as our last run of steroids, where we had 17 days of bloody stool. This time it was 18 days without prednisolone, except for a few traces of blood we observed a couple days into the "bloodless days". Overall, we were really tickled that he healed from this flare-up, and so quickly.

Apart from the natural healing of a healthy human body, and from divine intervention, for the record, we can also record the following:

We again had a enema treatment early into the bloody stools (which didn't really seem to be so effective, but who knows).
We didn't really get to any dietary changes we were talking about, with the SCD or other diet changes (our normal diet these days includes some meat and dairy, almost completely soy free, and mostly all healthy natural and homemade foods), except that we had a low-residue diet during the bloody stool phase.
We did start a daily regimen of VSL#3, a high potency probiotic. Isaac had finally gained some weight and we increased our doses of sulfasalazine and azathioprine. We discounted this from his healing because those drugs by themselves don't seem to bring about healing according to the studies. But hopefully we have the right dose to maintain remission for a long long time. Isaac also got a fresh run of L-Glutamine.

We are really happy. We had a colonoscopy scheduled and everything. The doctor was fine with being hopeful and patient to see if he came around on his own, and when we started to see improvement we went with the flow and canceled the colonoscopy. One downside is that the VSL has a nasty taste and it's difficult to get it into Isaac sometimes. We hide it in ice cream and yogurt and drinks, but it's tough.
Posted by troybee at 4:18 PM

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