Where to begin...
Before I tell my story I would first like to say how much this forum has helped in certain aspects and how much knowledge I've gained from reading through other peoples articles over the last 2 and a half years,and to anyone who is going through this or similar issues I feel your pain and i hope that we can one day get out of this hole,as well I would like to stare that this might be a long thread and I highly appreciate anyone who reads it and offers any guidance or advice,so here goes:
I'm 22 years old 2 months of becoming 23 and I'm starting to question if it's worth this fight anymore,I never thought it would be like this but I'm being deadly serious unfortunately,my journey started in the late ends of 2015 after I went to the doctors for what I presumed was some kind of cold,at the time I was excercsing heavily in terms of weightlifting and running and was mainly eating a fat based diet and not sleeping well which I believe was causing some form of high adrenal stress,I had decided to start hitting the gym harder as at the age of 20 I was mostly just on and off with the gym but I wanted to be more serious about it and achieve the goals a had for myself at the time,I looked relatively good and had a good lean figure,I used to go out all the time every week getting drunk in clubs being relatively successful with women as a lot of 20 year olds do and would like to do and that was kind of who I was,that was what made me,me I didn't want to be this way forever just before I found my asked a decent career and settled down with a wife,now in recent times these goals and dreams have come crashing down around to what Is known as Candida (but it is more complex than this) I cannot even describe the emotional turmoil and suffering this has caused me and I'm sure others can relate,it's really horrible I know,at this age I never would of dreamed I would be in this chronic position of Ill health and not being able to go out with my mates and everyone around me and be the person I was at the time,so back to late 2015,after changing to this diet and working out I was noticing that I was starting to feel different mentally and physically and that something was off so I decided to go to the doctors and after many trips of talking about a Metallic and bad taste in my mouth I was prescribed a course of
Antibiotics and since then my life has never been the same,for months after this I was getting continuously worse health wise untill I could barely even work because of the physical pain it was causing,aswell at the time of being prescribed these
Antibiotics I was suffering from gastric reflux which I have realised was caused by me taking ibuprofen to combat the supposed cold I thought I had but damaged the lining of my stomach,at the same time of the
Antibiotics I was prescribed a ppi anti acid blocker which gave me raging terrible side effects (including the world spinning and things getting smaller and bigger and seeing shadows) these things I now know can lead to a Candida overgrowth which I now know was the cause of the metallic and bitter taste in my mouth back then,another thing alongside this which I think was causing problems and still does is insulin resistance as then and now I am hungry all the time,literally all the time if I don't eat for an hour the hunger pants are intense and stop me from focusing on anything I'm doing,I think the high fat diet I was trying at the time is part to blame for this getting out of hand and since then I havnt really recovered,all the time I was getting worse I was eating sugary foods and carbohydrates all day every day because I didn't know what was going on with me,and because of hypoglycemic symptoms,around march of 2016 I entered a state of feeling constantly drunk and since then I've never come out of it,I mean 24/7 since then I feel drunk and like im detached from reality,I actually long and try and wonder what it is like to not feel like this now because I feel like I'm in a dream and almost can't believe that the majority of the world is not like this,it's crazy... further on at this time more symptoms were bloating severe constipation really light coloured stools and sticky stools which float,I later around June discovered this was being caused by what I'm guessing was a whipworm infestation,I really hate thinking back on this part now,basically what was happening is that these worms were attatchdd to the side of the part of my colon where bile gets recycled,which was causing a blockage of this getting through,this was why my stool was sticky and floating and very light coloured and why my eyes were stinging(low vit A) and why my bones were making it so I had to sit down in my retail job and sit down in the shower because it hurt to stand (problems with low vitamin D) both fat soluble vitamins which i was lacking in vile,of course this infestation made it so the Candida could rapdily grow alongside the high of environment the ammonia of these worms was creating,it's f***ed up how many things around here went wrong to lead me into this current situation as you can see which is why I have no real idea what the true root cause of this all was anyway after getting many stool tests for
parasites done I was told there was none(like many post on this forum have said) in the UK
parasites are unheard of apparently and even though it got to the point I was shouting at the doctor with physical proof of a worm in a bag I was crazy and told to start an antidepresessant,now this is where some luck happens,because In the UK you can buy mebendazole over the counter for the only recognized form if
parasite apparently (whipworm) I had access and a shot at clearing this infestation If I was correct,so I prayed to god that this could help me as I tried many natarual methods (black walnut,garlic,wormwood,pumpkin seeds etc) to try and get rid of what I thought was a parasite,so I took this drug at 3 times the dose of what is prescribed for pinworms and low and behold these worms started dropping appearing in my stool with the foulest smell you could imagine and wow I took the medicine for 5 days and there was alot of them,to this date I don't know for certain which worms they were and only going off images of the internet and comparing I can make sense it was whipworm as they had long tails and a slightly bigger head to them,really it was quite sickening seeing this and felt completely shocked that this could occur in a 1st world country and doctors could write it off,anyway let's carry on so around this same time I found out after months of browsing the web trying to find what is making me so I'll and unable to do anything that this thing called Candida existed,so here I am now still with it but I'm not going to leave out the details which go from this point to to my current point,at this time of discovering what actually made sense to me I was happy that I potentially knew what I had but I hd no idea how hard it was to get rid of it either,so I spent hundreds of the money I had saved on supplements and herbs diet etc to eradicate Candida but I kept cheating on the diet still as the hunger pangs from insulin resistance were too much,now I repeated this process untill around February 2017 where another major milestone occurred,so okay around this time I was trying to fast and as an idea to solve the ongoing constipation I thought maybe it be wise to eat two whole packs of
Aspartame filled polo mints to induce some form of diahere temporarily,well that night this worked and it was painful but it seemed to work so the next day something terrible happened,in the morning I woke up to a painful stomach but thought it normal so I ate some more polos to continue the effects and at the same time consumed these vitamin A/zinc tablets which are meant to be dissolved in water before consumption,this tablet and the aslaramte in the polos in guessing had a really bad xhemkxal reaction in my stomach and I was in server stomach pain and home shouting out in pain for an hour at how much it hurt,luckily my parents weren't gone to question what the he'll was going on,so at this point I had to resort to lying on the floor facing upwards so the acidic solution would slide up to my eosophahus giving some releif to the continued pain in my stomach,which ultimately had led to what I can easily tell is a esophagul ulcer which has been the worst f***ing nightmare I could imagine in the last year since then,why? well I don't know how but apparently when this area of the eosophahus feels irritation or
Pain it causes the stomach to stop producing stomach acid normally as a protective mechanism,I know this from the symptoms and the feelings I get when this happens.
I mean I'm telling you it's f***ing ridiculous.
in a way I'm lucky because if I take betaine hcl pills it an by pass the ulcer part and it gets my stomach to work normally and have less low acid symptoms,but this only last until i consume a typical stomach irritant as has been happening on and off since.
when this happens and my stomach acid is low my parathyroid goes into overdrive as found from blood tests which also found my vitamin d was low.
I didn't realise but at this time i was soothing this ulcer I thought with this almond milk drink but i didn't realise what it was actually doing which is messing around the with the vitamin d and calcium levels in my blood which led to horrible symptoms where my body was telling me to go sleep and forcing me to sleep after being up for around 2 hours at a time like I was going into some sort of psuedo coma,so to this day this occurs on and off in lucky that j have the money to keep buying these hcl tabs and keep trying to stop falling into temptation of eating foods which aggravate the ulcer,I know it's trying to heal itself and of I leave it to do so for 8 weeks plus unscathed it probably will,but this has definitely caused my health to worsen (Candida and low stomach acid=bad) so anyway to the final milestone which was really put me to edge now was last year I got food poisoning from a kebab shop and the symptoms were f***ing horrible again,I think the leaky gut from my Candida was leaking the toxin of the pathogen into my blood as one of the worst parts of this was the mental stop s and anxiety I was feeling as well as my body again forcing me to sleep against my will at a certain time,I'm guessing the toxin was killing a certain hormone or whatever I'm my blood to do this,the regular symptoms were fever bloody diarrhea mucus in stool,toxic taste in mouth and lack of appetite,as first the pathogen was travelling through the small intestine,great so anyway the course of this regular food poisoning had been and gone however this pathogen definitely hasn't,I feel completely alone describing this symptom but as I can definitely confirm the dysbios which comes with Candida the pathogen still remains in my colon not fully clearly and apparently colonised to a certain extent,the effects of this have been getting weaker since I got this initially and I don't even get intestinal symptoms like you would expect,for months however I was getting pus in my stool from the white blood cells attacking the bacteria,not so much now just mucus and the prime symptom which is toxic smelling gas and breath from the toxin whatever this pathogen is producing,it really is quite awful,logical says that because of my intense dysbios this pathogen has no competion to help drive it our leading only the adaptive immune system to fight it off which the pathogen is definitely getting killed by but not at a rate fast enough to eliminate it entirely,the toxin is made worse when I eat anything with iron in and from looking at various studies I have found is because iron is used to produce this toxin which my best guess could be a cytolethwl distending toxin from camplyobacter,this toxin effectively can stop the immune system from fully activating which would explain why it has such a hard time fully getting rid of this pathogen,which f***ing sucks
So I'm nearly at the end of this long story which I really wish I never had to write and I have some questions such as
how do I ever get the f*** out of this whole?
what do I treat first? the Candida ? the ulcer? the pathogen?
with what? how?
they cross over if I try and do the Candida diet and eat veg and fish a lot I eat too much Iron making the pathogen toxin worse,if I f*** up the ulcer I make low stomach acid and the pathogen has an easier time growing?
it's really a big f***ing mess and I'm being emotionally slaughtered here it's like i m sure all my good bacteria is completely f***ing dead and is it even possible to ever get this back now? if I take an
Antibiotic to kill the pathogen I may end up giving myself c diff maybe? which I know would have an easy time growing and killing me in my current situation of dysbiosis,all my life is now is playing video games and trying to work out if I can ever go back to a normal life ever again and if I'll ever come out of this drunk feeling of unreality which I have all the time,from a 20 year old with dreams,aspirations etc to what I am now I don't know what's the point holding on anymore,I have definitely had s different view of life since this experience and I would just love to be able to be normal by the time in maybe 25 or 26 and then work really hard to get a relatively well paying job2 move out and start a family,but how? please I just don't know what to do anymore and if there's any hope,it would mean absouletely so much just for some advice or some words of encouragement because I feel so lost and alone now,my parents like many don't really get what's going on and have s hard time believing my struggle,my friends luckily still talk to me but I can't go out with them and enjoy life I used so it's getting distant and cold? i thank so much for reading this far if you have and would appreciate any advice you can give.