Pat,
For some strange reason, doctors almost always have that response about C. diff, because like MC, they mistakenly consider it to be a "rare" disease - I suppose it's their default response. A lot of people mistakenly believe that if you have C. diff, you will have blood in the stool, but that's not always true, sometimes it is occult, or even missing.
If I recall correctly, a couple of years or so ago, one member, (tendertummy), had her doctor give her the runaround for several months, before we finally talked her into insisting that her doctor test her for C. diff. Her doctor reluctantly agreed, but assured her that the test would be negative. Sure enough, it was. We nagged her to insist on a second test, though, and she did indeed test positive on the second test, as I recall. She had to take the two-week treatment twice, the second time with Vancomycin.
Katy recently had a staph infection for about five or six months, I believe, before her doctor finally tested for it, along with a C. diff test, and found it. To my knowledge, quite a few of our members have had a C. diff infection, but I'm not aware that any of them had to be hospitalized because of it. Most members in that situation just assume that they have refractory MC, so they suffer needlessly.
C. diff does usually have pretty severe GI symptoms - the problem is that most doctors don't realize that MC can sometimes have symptoms almost as severe, for some of us, so it's not always easy to distinguish the difference. If you don't have severe abdominal pain, or cramps, you probably don't have it. Most of the members who have had C. diff, rarely post anymore, these days. I believe that Sunny was the last one, for example. Typically, C. diff will make you so sick that you will feel reluctant to get very far away from the bathroom. As I recall, though, tendertummy never stopped going to work. Maybe Katy can tell you what an internal staph infection feels like.
From what I read, testing for parasites also has a very poor record of false negatives in this country. Doctors consider modern conditions to be too sanitary to allow for the possibility of parasite infections, so they generally discount that possibility, and the tests apparently aren't sensitive enough to detect them in many cases, anyway.
Pat wrote:Tex,
Thanks for "fixing" the site problem. Why would anyone want to hack this site?
A lot of younger people with computer skills, (mostly in Euro-Asian and Mid-East countries), have way too much time on their hands these days, and instead of using their skills for something constructive, they find that it's much easier to be destructive, instead. They download computer applets, that instruct their computers to search the web for discussions boards, and automatically register on those boards, so that they can include a link back to their own websites, in order to improve their ratings with the search engines, (the more links there are back to their site, the higher their index ratings with the search engines). I'm sure that the fact that this board has customized registration filters in place, that eliminate computerized registration, does not set very well with those who have gone to the trouble to create all those scripts for automatically registering on php boards. Hacking is an adolescent attempt to get revenge for shutting them out. The don't seem to care that some of these boards supply vital support for people with serious medical issues, who need to exchange health information, on a regular basis.
It could have been worse, I suppose.
You're most welcome.
Tex
Visit the Microscopic Colitis Foundation Website
I was trying to get to the bathroom in time, some did slip out and fortunately most went in the toilet. I guess my new doctor may be right and I also have IBS. Does anyone else also have IBS as well as MC? How does one manage this? I just want to cry.
