Friday, January 15, 2010

Recurrent C-diff with Pulse Dose

In my last post I described my confusion about whether I had an allergy reaction or food born bacteria from the deli salads or actually had another c-diff recurrence. I'm fairly certain that my symptoms were just another c-diff recurrence. I had used the pulse dose method (skipping days between vancomycin doses). That allows the antibiotic resistant spores to morph into bacteria, which I can then kill with the new antibiotic dose. However, I seemed to get recurrent c-diff symptoms from those newly morphed bacteria, after only 4 days. If I wait 6 days between doses, I really feel awful with cramping intestinal pain and nausea.

So this week I planned to space doses apart 5 days. However, by today (5 days after my last vanco dose), I had really obvious colitis pain but not much diarrhea. So I took one vanco at breakfast and another one at lunch. I planned to just take probiotics with dinner to replenish the 'good bacteria' killed by the vanco. Nevertheless, I still have slight cramping. So I wonder whether I need to another vanco before bed. I hope my test results come earlier than the usual 3 weeks after sending the sample.

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