saw doctor about diarrhea

[redbird]

I've been suffering recurrent diarrhea for the last few weeks, weirdly without any other noticeable/relevant symptoms: no nausea or vomiting, no fever, no significant pain. There's no pattern to when I have the symptoms, in terms of what I do or don't eat, the time of day, or anything else I've noticed. I've been intermittently miserable, in part from the diarrhea, and in part from sleep deprivation, because that "no pattern" has included being unable to get settled/comfortable enough to go to sleep, and waking up in the night with the runs and needing to sit up until things settle down again.

I saw Carmen this morning, and she listened to my gut, and poked me gently in a few places to see how I reacted. Based on that, she doesn't think there's anything significantly wrong with my kidneys, liver, or pancreas.

Carmen had the tech draw blood for testing, and they sent me home with a stool sample kit (oh joy). If those tests don't produce an answer, the next step is either a GI doctor or a colonoscopy.

Also:

At Adrian's suggestion, I took a covid test a couple of weeks ago, which was negative.

The three of us don't eat all the same things, but the only thing that I eat and that neither she nor Cattitude does is most dairy, particularly ice cream, yogurt, and milk.

I've tried skipping dairy for a day or so, and separately tried a day of just rice, banana, apple sauce, and tea, and neither of those things seemed to make a difference.

ETA 12/20: the blood test showed nothing unusual. I gave them a stool sample two days ago, and there was a MyChart message about a new test result, but it turned out to be an updated version of the blood test results. Meanwhile, I keep having bouts of diarrhea, but at least they haven't kept me up horribly late, or had me out of bed before dawn, in the last couple of days.

Comments

[sraun]

I know I'm somewhere between fairly & significantly lactose intolerant. If I have something with lactose, I can identify the effect anywhere from eight hours to over two days later. Lactose has two effects on my, they show up at about the same time - diarrhea and farts that smell like sour milk.

I know people can have diarrhea from dairy that is not due to lactose, even though lactose is the most common problem.

So, maybe could be dairy? I think you'd have to go longer than a day or so, more like four days to a week, to really rule it out.