About 10 months ago I started a recurring pattern of the runs, about once a month I’ll have significant cramping followed by a blowout and then oddly my bowel habit will go right back to normal out of nowhere. Once I had a complete blowout followed by a normal bowel movement the same day. Often times there will be mucus in the normal movements afterwards too, not a lot like with the diarrhea but just more than normal.
My Dr has done several in depth blood tests on my liver and kidney functions (once the stool looked pale) everything was normal, several CBC’s and everything looked good. The only oddity was my B12 was ever so slightly low once, I think the low cut off was 300 and I tested like 298 or 297 which corrected itself a month later, still lower end normal but normal.
The Dr is thinking IBS as I have been under a ton of stress starting 10 months ago, we moved, I started new work, other health concerns popped up and I’ve been an anxiety riddled wreck for all of it. I can see the direct impact as once after seeing a specialist for other concerns I had a blowout and I’d image that did directly correlate to my anxiety with that appointment.
I would say I’m more gassy and bloated overall but I can’t say that for sure, it’s the kind of thing you don’t notice until you think about it and then you tend to be hyper aware.
So ultimately, I have had a blowout about once a month for 10 months now, the entirety of which I’ve been under immense stressors. I know there isn’t a definitive test for Chrohn’s disease or Ulcerative Colitis but I was wondering if I should push for more tests or just work on my stress and trust it’s IBS?
The Dr said he wasn’t terribly worried about IBD as my inflammation markers are all very normal. He also took a basic stool sample to check for parasites (and whatever else that checks for? Would like to know if you have input) which came back negative.