Prolonged traveler's diarrhea, abdominal cramps, stringy white and mucusy stools

[chefontour]

I'm an otherwise healthy 23yr old white female. I've been living in Brazil for the last 5 months. I felt mostly fine for the first 2 months. During the third month, I started having really painful stools - so much that I dreaded using the bathroom in general. Almost every stool felt like it ripped my anus open, and was almost always accompanied by blood - not IN the stool, but on the toilet paper afterward. Out of nowhere, that cleared up after about 6 weeks of hell. I was fine for the next month and a half (I was staying in the biggest and most developed city in the country, FYI).
A little over a month ago, I came to the Northeast region, which is much more rural and undeveloped than the South. I had been feeling a little uncomfortable in my abdominal region for the week prior to leaving, but attributed it to bad PMS. My first night here, I went to a seafood restaurant. I've never had issues with seafood before, but for reference, I had octopus, lobster, and a kind of white ocean fish specific to this area. The next day, I felt horrible bloating and nearly debilitating abdominal cramps all afternoon. I vomited right before dinner, didn't eat anything, and vomited 2-3 more times before I slept. The next day, my body traded the vomiting for explosive diarrhea, 5-6 times a day for the next 3-4 days. I'm a chef, so the first thing I did was treat myself for any type of food-born illness - I ate only plain foods for the next 2 days, drank only bottled water (I had been doing this since I arrived), et cetera. The abdominal cramps continued, and so did the diarrhea. It's been a full 5 weeks now. Every morning, about a half hour after I wake up, I get abdominal cramps, then maybe 15 minutes later I have diarrhea. This happens again in the late afternoon. It's not painful or anything (the cramps are - the diarrhea isn't), but it's really annoying.
I finally broke down and told my partner what was going on yesterday, since I needed him to translate to the pharmacist. They gave me two effervescent tablets (baking soda, sodium carbonate, acetosalic acid, and citric acid compound) and a medicine called Kaosec (loperamida chloride? my translation may not be correct).  I took one of the effervescent tablets right away along with one of the other pills, and then the other effervescent this morning.
This afternoon, I passed a very concerning stool. For lack of a better description, it looked like a cluster of white ramen noodles. It was sticky and had a mild odor. It was attached to a light yellow mucusy thread that had a thin, brown line running through it (it looked like the digestive tract of a shrimp when you de-vein them).
Is this the medicine, do I have a parasite, or is it indicative of some kind of bowel disorder? Any tips are much appreciated.

[shells44]

Did you ever find out what this was??? I just experienced the same thing!!!

[ggreg]

I'm not an expert, but gosh, it does sound like you expelled some worms.  And I would say the medicine actually helped those go out, especially if you start feeling worlds better today and tomorrow.  If not, you could either go the pharmacy route again and ask for a dewormer, or visit a doc and tell him your symptoms, and he'll give you the exact right medicine for your kinda worms, since he'll do a stool sample and all that.  He could also make sure you don't have some sort of intestinal bacteria on top of everything else.  You could look online what various seafood worms look like.  And I do think it was the seafood, mainly because of the time frame.

By the by, the first incident back in the city, that was constipation, as you probably already know, and waste gets hard and dry and difficult to pass, so when it goes by irritated vascular tissues or flared hemorrhoids (same thing), it'll bleed just like yours did.  The solution whenever you get that is to drink extra water, and eat washed-off salad or washed raw vegies or whole grain foods.  The same thing helps with diarrhea.