My story: very mild and quick acting Crohn's?

Hello everybody. I have been struggling with recurrent abdominal pain in the right lower quadrant for almost a year. First my doc thought of appendicitis, but after a few colonscopies I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease.

My gastroenterologist thinks I have crohn's diease, but the pathologist says that the specimens from my colon and ileum show signs of "chronic inflammation", but without Crohn's specific pattern. In fact, I don't have any ulcers, scars or bleeding.

So the bowel is inflamed, but no diagnosis can be done yet.

The strange thing about my flare ups is that they come very quickly: I usually have just a slight sensation of burning if I dig in my abdomen with my fingers, that can get better or worse while time passes. Stool is sometimes very flaccid but I don't have diarrhea.

But at some point, multiple times a year, it suddenly explodes: in the matter of a few hours I get from being almost pain free to very sick. I get nausea, strong pain that makes it hard to move my right leg or sleep, and day by day be stool gets worse until it becomes diarrhea.

The strange thing is not only how sudden the flare up arrives, but how easy it is to make it go away. I have heard of people having flare ups for months or years and meds give only partial relief.

Well... for me it works like this: I just need to take antibiotics and after 3 days the problem is fixed. After 5 days I am almost pain-free again, with perfect stool and wonderful hunger and sense of well being.

The exact same thing happened with cortisone: I took budesonide for a month, but after just 3 days the pain and inflammation cooled down. Although I had a bad flareup after stopping the med (even though I did it gradually, as the doc said).

So I'm asking to myself: what the hell? Is it really crohn's? My gastro is almost sure it is, but my story seems so different from anybody else's. Has any of you guys experienced very quick remissions with antibiotics? And how suddenly do usually flareups happen?

For me almost any antibiotic works: first my general practitioner put me on Levofloxacin, then on Ciprofloxacin, and then the first gastroenterologist put me on Rifamixin.

Here in Italy Rifamixin has a very low cost (8 euro for 12 pills) and it does wonders for putting me in remission. Too bad that remissions usually don't last long.

Cortisone also did wonders, but stopping it was has been disastrous. Huge bloating and gas at first, and a very bad flare up after a few days.

Looks more like recurrent infections or partial obstruction of the appendix. But well, for now my gastro says it's Crohn's.

Hello to the board!
Vash from Italy

Welcome!

From what I've gathered, the disease is very individual. The vast majority of people I know with Crohn's have periods of flare and remission, with remission often lasting years between. Of course, that's with the support of medication and under careful watch by a GI. You are right in that some people have a very hard time with the disease, but that's only SOME people, and sometimes there are reasons that the disease is so severe for them (undetected for so long, unmedicated, other conditions, etc).

Someone also made a point to me that the people who are in remission or who don't have too hard of a time with it are not the ones posting on forums and the web because they're not thinking much about it.

Some flares can come in fast, others can be slow in coming. My mom has it as well, and her flares seem to be more sudden than mine. The disease is just very individual. The sooner it's caught, the better, because it can be more easily put in remission and maintained. Some people have no symptoms and go undiagnosed until they have an obstruction or something similar, at which point the disease has done more damage.

Basically, if you have it, know it is a chronic disease, but it CAN get better. It's important to talk with your GI doc, identify whether you have Crohn's or another IBD, and start treatment.