Hi there. I may have said this to you before, so please forgive me if I repeat myself myself (little joke).My husband had miserable GI problems after abx for several years--massive bloating, peristalsis would quit for several days, his intestines would get hard as a rock, his stomach was sore to the touch, he'd throw up several times a day, an have either diahrrea or constipation. He was always nauseous and in pain.
We found a wonderful non-LL GI guy who did a complete endoscopy and colonoscopy and found he was ulcerated from stem to stern, had a hiatal hernia, had polyps in his colon, and decided he had a massive overgrowth of C. difficile and H. pylori.
Treated him for the bugs, which made a huge difference; put him on Nexium; had him go through a de-yeasting treatment; and removed the polyps.
At his last check up 3 years later, most of the ulceration has completely healed, no polyps, and my husbands stomach rarely bothers him at all (until he started on Mepron, and had the diarrhea again. But even that's not horrible, and quits whenever he takes a mepron break).
So -- just wanted you to know there's a happy ending. The C. difficile info is not well known -- our GI guy did much of the pioneering research on it. Let me know if you need your doc to talk to him, my husband was quite the case study. Good luck, hope you get more comfortable soon.
Just editing to say that the GI problems started with LD, not with the abx -- the abx and immune system imbalances just exacerbated some of the problems and lead to the difficile and h pylori overgrowth.
[This message has been edited by minoucat (edited 11 October 2004).]