IBS Study Survey *CLOSED*

**This study is now closed. But I really appreciate all of the responses I got to this post!**

My aunt forwarded me an email from her nursing instructor last night about a fellow PhD candidate who is doing her dissertation study on IBS.

She's conducting a survey of people between the ages of 30 and 50 (may be expanding it to 20 to 60, depending) with IBS. If you'd like to participate and help her out, let me know, and I can get you her email address. After contacting her, she'll send you a packet with information about the study and a questionnaire. You just fill it out and return it to her in the postage-paid packet.

I don't really want to post her email address on here, so email me if you're interested: ibsrachel at gmail dot com (obviously inserting symbols for the at and dot ;). Thanks!


Side note: I'm only 26, but I emailed her, and she's going to send me a packet because she thinks she will be expanding her survey to 20 to 60 year olds.

Imodium update

I feel like I failed with the timing for trying to stop the Imodium. This past weekend went really well, but there were a couple of things that have gone wrong this week so far that are making it hard to tell how I'm actually doing without it.

First is that I'm working 6 days in a row this week, and two of those days are 13 hour days. I don't usually get a chance to eat at work, so that really throws me off.

Second is that I've made some very poor food choices...like last night I decided to have two massive, greasy pieces of pizza, a Pepsi and four big Reese's. I felt like hell after that, and I'm still paying for it today.

Last is that this is the week before my period starts, and that week is always a hell week for me. I'm crampy, bloated, and have urgency and diarrhea regardless of what I do.

With all of that put together, I'm not sure if being off the Imodium is going well or not because I feel like crap right now. I'm going to keep pushing through this week and hope that it's just the factors above that are causing me to feel sick. And no more pizza. Or Reese's.

Tapering off the Imodium

You guys probably know that I've been taking a half tablet of Imodium almost daily to control the most life-limiting effect of my IBS- the diarrhea. It has worked better than anything else I've ever tried before, but I've been wondering how I'd do once I went off of it. My guess was that the diarrhea, cramps and urgency would come back just as strong as before, and almost immediately.

I have a four day weekend (again!) this weekend, so I decided to go for it. At first I was going to taper off- go from taking it daily to every other day then every 2 days and so on- but I wanted results more quickly than that. And, if it doesn't go well, I wanted to have at least a day to start taking it daily again and recover before my 13 hour day on Wednesday.

Today is the day after my second skipped dose. I haven't had any urgency or any loose stools. I'm actually going less often than I have been going the past few days which is definitely interesting. There was one kind of strange thing that happened after stopping it though- I'm not sure if it's a complete coincidence or what, but I thought I'd mention it. I skipped my first dose Friday night, and I was taking a nap last night- around 24 hours after my first skipped dose- and I woke up. My intestines felt incredibly weird. Like numb and tingly, but only certain stretches of my intestines were numb. After I walked around a bit while getting ready for bed and spent some quality time with my heating pad, the feeling went away.

It could have been that I was sleeping in a position that put pressure on a nerve and that section literally just fell asleep- I was sleeping on a full size bed with two dogs and a cat who thought they owned the bed...

Anyway, I bought a bag of BBQ chips Friday and there's only 1/4 of the bag left, and I'm still doing just fine. I don't know about you guys, but BBQ chips were my favorite growing up and they would absolutely kill me if I overdid it before the Imodium. Hopefully it stays like this and I don't have to take the Imodium every day. I'm not a fan of taking meds, so taking one daily annoys me.

By the way, thank you guys for the increase in comments I've been getting recently! I love interacting with people out there going through the same things I am.