Diagnosis

I was pretty panicked all day waiting for my 4:45 appointment with the GI. I kept imagining that it would be the worst possible news (how we torture ourselves!?) and how I would react and feel hearing this.

I arrived on time and was eventually ushered into a room to wait. He's usually on time, even came in to grab something and said he'd just be "a minute" but was gone for another 10 or 15 minutes. His hurriedness made me think that there was uncomfortable news to come.

Finally it was my turn.

And it was a mixed bag.

The polyp was fine, nothing abnormal there. Whew. Thank god. And then the other shoe dropped.

"We have the answer to your problem."

Ok. Before the colonoscopy I did stool samples (3 days long) that tested me for every bacterial, parasite, or worm on the planet and they were all negative. I was also tested for celiac disease (blood test). Also negative. So he had taken biopsies during the colonoscopy and this actually told him what the problem was. My understanding was that the only real options were dismal:

cancer
celiac disease (spruae)
chron's disease

So I assumed that it was one of these. My heart sank.

"Lymphocytic Colitis. You should write this down."

He continued to explain that lymphocytic colitics is a somewhat rare condition (affects 1 in 100,000 to 19.6 in 100,000 people depending on what data you believe). It's characterized by lymphocytes infiltrating the colon in response to "something." No one seems to know what really causes it. Sometimes it's NSAIDs that cause it, bacteria or bacterial toxins, viruses, or a purely immune fuckup.

In my case it could be any of these.

NSAIDs? I was on Rx strength for two weeks before this started (surgeon prescribed them after my surgery on 6/30).

Bacteria or bacterial toxins? I had sushi the day before it started out in Brooklyn. I was also eating Prilosec, which drops the pH of the stomach (which, in turn, lets some forms of bacteria run rampant).

Immune conditions? Check. I have psoriasis, elevated natural killer cells. My mom is HLA-B27 positive (tissue type known for immune screw ups) - I'm not but I can't help but wonder if there is a relation here.

I've spent the better part of the night reading. It seems it can go away over time with proper medication, but can return randomly through life. Usually woman over 50 get this. Here I am at 45 with it though, and I suspect that this might be my 2nd bout with this in my life (the first being in 2004 or 2005).

So - tomorrow I see Dr. Check - IVF doctor and Reproductive Immunologist extraordinaire. I hope that he can shed a bit of light on whether I can cycle this month or not. If this is truly immune related, I would be crazy to put embryos into me right now.

I'll figure out what the next steps are tomorrow. In the meantime, there's a GI Medical Article that said that 75% of LC patients that took 8 pills of pepto bismol a day for 8 weeks were cured and stayed stable. The other 25%? They didn't do too bad either.

Clearly I'll be hitting up costco tomorrow to buy industrial sized packages of pepto bismol tablets.


And yet one more possible roadblock to my doing my next IVF cycle.

Sigh.