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Possible Flare Up?

Hi everyone,

My boyfriend was diagnosed with Crohn's 12 years ago when he was a teenager. Since then he has been very fortunate and pretty much lived symptom free. He still takes Azathioprine and until 3 months ago was also taking Pentasa (it was suggested by the hospital that he stop). As his symptoms have been minimal for so long he can get lazy with his medication, but overall he does still take it regularly.

Over the past year he has had a several episodes that I think may be related to Crohn's but both his GP and specialist have suggested they are not linked which I find quite hard to believe. It started out one day where he described his stomach as feeling very 'gassy' and uncomfortable to the point he couldn't sit or lie still due to the pain, and the only way to 'pass the gas' was by vomiting several hours after the onset. This happened a couple of times within a few weeks so he visited the specialist who first said it was unlikely to be Crohn's related.

Over the next few months the same thing happened again 2-3 times along with an increase in stomach growling, but during this time we moved to the UK so he was unable to go back to his usual GP and specialist. When we arrived, my boyfriend enrolled here and had a stool sample, colonoscopy and blood test all which came back to say his Crohn's was inactive.

Flash forward another 5 months and up until 3 weeks ago he had been feeling great again. However, since then he has had one of the vomiting instances and then 4 out of the past 7 days come home from work exhausted with a mildly 'gassy stomach' that he seems to be able to sleep off. His eyes are also very bloodshot all the time and the stomach growling has started again. He has been getting a decent amount of sleep each night and I don't know if it is a coincidence but the 4 days it has happened, he got up earlier and went to the gym.

He has an appointment with a specialist in March but as that feels such a long way away I'm trying to gather any information I can, and wondered whether anyone else had suffered from anything similar? It's really hard to see him not feeling himself and me not being able to help.

Thank you for reading such a lengthy post and any response is very much appreciated!
 
@sisco: Could be a minor flare or a freaky coincidence. Although not similar, I tend to have random symptoms once in a while that go away in a few days or a week. So far, they have not resulted in anything serious in follow-up check-ups.

Keeping up with the medications and continuing to maintain a healthy life style (exercise, diet) should help. I wouldn't worry too much about waiting till March if he is doing fine overall. It will come sooner than you think :)
 
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