Vanco Tapered Doses

I'm halfway through the first week of tapering vancomycin. If you missed my previous entries, cutting my vancomycin daily doses in half theoretically will allow the c-diff spores to morph into bacteria. My current approach is one vanco every 12 hours. So during the 12 hour break, some spores will become bacteria only to be zapped by the next vanco dose. On Saturday I begin once a day doses. That will give the spores 24 hours to morph and get zapped. During the following week I give remaining spores 48 hours to morph and get zapped. During the last week before I leave for Maui, I repopulate my gut with high dose probiotics.

My husband keeps asking me how the tapering process is going. Maybe he wants to know whether this is working. Frankly, I DON'T KNOW. LOL I no longer have obvious diarrhea, but now have rather normal soft stools. I also noticed that when I take my low dose probiotics (8-12 billion good bacteria per capsule), motility dramatically increases (I have to go several times afterwards). I hope the high dose probiotics will do the same thing. Also how much I 'go' depends on how much fiber I consume. That's a huge change from what I experienced during 500mg daily vanco treatment, when I had diarrhea several times a day no matter what I ate. I also have no nausea, dizziness, chills, cramping pain or extreme fatigue, which were my other (non stool-related) c-diff symptoms.

I had expected to experience some c-diff symptoms as the spores morph into bacteria, before vanco killed them. However, I suspect that more spores will morph during once a day or once every other day vanco doses. Again, I'm playing wait and see. I have no other guidelines beyond what I read in that one study about pulse dosing and another doctor's website report of success with tapered dosing. Nevertheless, those are more promising than any other recurrent c-diff treatment approaches I read.