Have crohns, constant abdominal/chest pains.Unable to eat,very hard

[Jkchng_1]

3 years ago I came down with crohn's disease, had a resection of my ileum and since that day. I constantly have pain in my gut and thinking about it all the time, causes me to have anxiety and chest pains. it cripples me, I can't eat, I can't get out of bed..I've been to the emergency room way too many times thinking it was crohns related.  I seriously need help. I don't know what to do. I get medicated with narcotics in the hospital,recover and feel better and released me. once I get back home,something will trigger it and I'm back all over in the crippling pain,the loss of appetite. my question is; I do have anxiety and it seems that I'm constantly worrying about the pain in my abdomen and that it just won't go away. this is a real issue, I cannot live like this. so what should I do?? I started taking Paxil a week ago & have been on so many ssris for about 20 years.I'm in the emergency room yesterday.I checked myself into mental health,thinking if they can't find anything after all the visits in the ER,then it has to be in my head. but after the assessment,they said that there is nothing wrong with me?!!? I'm now in a room in the hospital and they are putting me on ativan, I'm so afraid to go home because the symptoms will start coming back again. I lose a lot of weight, I can't function &  hard to even bathe, to get out of bed,unable to eat. seriously!!! this is a very serious problem.

[Paxiled]

What you're suffering is fear, not anxiety.  The reason I say this is that you have a real reason to be concerned -- you've got pain probably connected to your surgery.  Either it never healed properly, the surgery wasn't done correctly, or it didn't actually solve the problem.  There might be a forum on here that applied more directly to crohn's disease.  This disorder falls into a larger category of diseases that are diagnosed by symptoms, not causes, the main one being inflammation in the digestive tract.  The main treatments are all designed to lessen this inflammation.  Nobody knows for sure what causes it and nobody has a cure that science accepts as proven.  The medical establishment will do their thing, which is to give you drugs that reduce inflammation but also cause other problems that in the long run often end up increasing inflammation while temporarily decreasing it.  Surgery is one of those things, and it doesn't cure any of these diseases.  It just temporarily diminishes the symptoms, assuming the surgery is successful and your body is able to recover -- remember, you already had a problem controlling inflammation in that area, and surgery causes inflammation which you might also not be able to control.  Doctors can only do what they can do.  If that isn't working, you need to try something else, and usually that drives people to health food stores and natural medicine, where you have centuries of use of some things, some things that are pretty new and we know little about, and no great studies because you can't patent anything natural so the money for really good research isn't there.  Still, the natural approach seems to be what's left for you, as I'm guessing before that surgery, or at least I hope this is the case, you were given the usual medications and advice on what to avoid eating to reduce stress on the digestive tract.  Natural medicine will go further, telling you to avoid all foods having evidence that some people suffer inflammation from them.  The most common suspects are wheat and dairy, with the next two being soy and corn.  They'll tell you to reduce red meat intake because it's hard to digest.  Too much fiber can cause aggravation, too little can also do that, so you need to find the happy medium that allows you to have the most comfortable bowel movements.  Some natural medicines are known to reduce digestive problems in some people, such as bifido bacteria, fermented foods such as sauerkraut and pickles that act as prebiotics, or food for probiotics, which regulate digestive health.  So while this disease has no known cure, if you've exhausted the medical community and what they do, try a different part of the medical community and see what they have to offer.  If you can find a physician who practices integrated medicine, it might just benefit you.  A holistic nutritionist might give you more time than any doctor will to really try some different dietary approaches.  Now, you also say you're a long-time user of ssris, so you do apparently have mental issues, and antidepressants are known to have as a common side effect digestive problems.  They tend to interfere with magnesium absorption, which is essential for digestive health.  They interfere with the natural use of serotonin, which is mostly in the digestive system, not the brain.  Therapy might be helpful to teach you some relaxation techniques and talk it out some, but it's hard to see how moving on to another class of drugs that don't address your problem will help in the long run.  Now, there are people who suffer digestive problems because of anxiety, but that didn't happen in your case.  The fear followed the lack of success in your treatment.  That messes with everyone, and is the largest reason for our current opioid problem -- failed medical procedures.  So yeah, you have anxiety, but it's about something real.  Tamping down that anxiety will only make you feel better.  But it still won't cut down on the inflammation in your digestive system.  There are some natural remedies that are relaxants that do that, such as chamomile, so again, there is another form of medicine out there that's a lot older than the one you've tried so far.  Because of this long history of mental distress that led you to use meds to treat it, again, anxiety can cause all sorts of digestive problems and the drugs used to treat it can make those problems occur or make them worse.  I had digestive problems before I got my anxiety disorder full-bore, and used the usual acid suppressants, but when I started on antidepressants, by then I was working in the natural foods biz and have been using that world to treat stomach problems since, mostly.  They avoid the long-term ill effects of the drugs used by docs to treat digestive problems.  You've got to keep dealing with that long-term mental problem, but you have a diagnosed physiological problem.  Whatever caused it, again, if at first you don't succeed in fixing it, try a different form of practitioner and see if you do better.    

[Jkchng_1]

Wow.thank you.you sound dead on! I'm in the hospital still. I've been taking solu-medro by iv and .05 mg of antivan.also,the 4,then to 2 mg morphine by iv,has been switched to 5/325 norco.I will not leave if my pain comes back!!! I'm glad I'm being weaned off the morphine,so as to see what is working.Im read tour reply with sincere intensity. What drinks and foods,besides sauerkraut and pickles do you recommend?? Thank. You.

[Jkchng_1]

How did you arrive with your response? Are you a medical professional

[Paxiled]

If I were a medical professional I probably wouldn't know anything about any of what I said!  I'm an odd bird -- I'm way over-educated with several degrees, so I know how to learn.  Because of my anxiety problem I stopped doing what I trained to do and fell into managing health food stores, which I haven't done for many years but did do for 18 years.  Being way over-educated, I just do a lot of learning about whatever I'm doing if I'm forced to learn, and I did when I started taking antidepressants.  I also had a doctor way back when I had a bleeding ulcer and suffered from migraines, and it being Berkeley, he told me to do a form of meditation called TM.  I was dubious, but finally did and guess what?  Despite suffering from mental illness my stomach problems and my migraines pretty much went away.  Then I started taking antidepressants for my agoraphobia and started getting some difficulty with the digestive system, and so I used my new knowledge gained in the health food world where I interacted every day with those kinds of professionals and dealt successfully with the problem using magnesium and aloe vera juice and DGL and other things that can control inflammation in the digestive system more gently than drugs can.  Some things are way better done with pharmaceuticals, and some are way better done without them.  It just depends.  One of the interesting things about digestive disorders, for example, is the universal admonition to not use spicy ingredients.  But some of the most useful substances to control digestive problems and inflammation are hot, such as turmeric, ginger, and cayenne.  I think it more depends on how acculturated one is to eating hot food -- someone in India isn't going to be bothered by what might bother someone who eats a very bland American diet.  It just depends.  Which is why I say, if at first one form of treatment doesn't work and is exhausted, there just might be something else out there.