u/EverybodySayin

Fishing for similar experiences here I guess. I take a heaped teaspoon of psyllium husk powder every morning to help with the constipation, which it does a bit.

I recently started taking Fybogel in the evenings with dinner, to see if it helped things further. Good lord, the morning diarrhea 😬 I can literally see the orangey-yellow lumps in it from the Fybogel as well!

If you folks have tried it, did you find it helpful or a bit much? Gonna stop it and see how I go for a few days and go from there, I checked for any ingredients like sorbitol to see if they were causing an issue but I checked on all the ingredients and there's nothing substantial there.

Hi all, 36m here. Not sure if this is the right place for this, but I was diagnosed with IBS-M based on symptoms and bloods. However, health anxiety kicking my ass and convincing me the diagnosis is wrong lol, I’m wondering if I should push for further testing.

I’ve had gas, bloating, abdominal pain, stress/anxiety-related diarrhea, and constipation for most of my adult life. In 2021, I was prescribed Amitriptyline for migraine prevention, which worsened the constipation. This led to occasional bright red blood on the stool or tissue and sometimes stinging during bowel movements and sometimes not. The blood heals in a few days typically, at times the blood is just a one-off. This happens a few times a year on average.

Around the time I got on the Amitriptyline, my abdominal also pain worsened. Initially was getting pain around my appendix area and right flank which worried me. I was referred for an ultrasound. The nurse covered pretty much my whole abdomen, which showed nothing abnormal. Since then the pain has come and gone, and I also get the same pain on my left side and a burning kind of pain across the middle of my belt line. This pain all worsens with stress/anxiety. I also had to go on a course of antibiotics fairly recently and it seemed to really inflame my bowels because I was in so much pain! I also from time to time get intense abdominal cramps that last a few minutes, I've been getting these again my whole adult life.

My doctor isn't concerned, saying my symptoms don't match the big C. I haven’t had weight loss, no dark blood in my stool or consistent "skinny" stools (they happen occasionally when I have stress-related diarrhea but my stool size is otherwise normal when I'm not constipated). Plus I'm sure there's a bit of an age thing there. We also qFIT tested the inside of my stool for deeper bleeding but negative result. I've considered coming off the Amitriptyline to see if things improve, but I'm terrified of going back to how I used to be with my migraines.

This has turned into a bit of a vent, sorry. Does my GP's IBS diagnosis sound accurate or is there anything there that's standing out to you folks that I should pursue? The thing is as well, I suffer from M.E. and some other co-morbid conditions and the whole bowel prep/scope thing is going to be so, so hard for me to carry out and is going to crash me really, really hard which is making me very hesitant about pursuing this, but obviously I'd rather not catch something serious too late.

Appreciate any advice and sorry for my rambling!

Growing up my dad had an older male friend. They worked together and would often hang out on weekends. To give some context into the time period, this all took place in the early 90s, and my dad at the time was in his 30s, while the older male friend was in his 60s. As a kid I didn’t really understand how strange it was, but my dad’s friend we called “uncle Jim” would often buy my father expensive gifts. I am talking high-fi stereos, camcorders, art, expensive firearms, concert and NFL tickets, all sorts of things. Many of these items were worth thousands of dollars in the early 90s, so today adjusted for inflation, some of them are kind of absurd. I can be fairly generous, but as a millennial I cannot imagine giving a friend a gift worth $5,000, let alone a dozen of them, all over a period of just a few years. He did not have the type of job that would make him extremely wealthy either. Uncle Jim made good money for the time, but was probably earning somewhere in the $70-100k range. He was not married but apparently had an adult son he was estranged from, but no family he regularly was in touch with. Then at some point in the mid 90s, uncle Jim and my father had a very abrupt falling out and we never saw him again. In the past we’ve joked with my dad about it and he’s just laughed it off without explaining what happened or why uncle Jim bought him so many expensive gifts. You may be wondering why my dad wouldn’t be more open about it, but he is married, from a small conservative community, and has grown more conservative over the years.