Gut Rumbles: Acidman is sick...

Gut Rumbles: Acidman is sick...It sounds like you have/had some sort of dysentery. The problem with dysentery is that although a healthy body will fight it off without resorting to medicines, you have to eat to stay healthy, and the disease won't let you keep anything in.

Two avenues of self-help are still available. First, you have to eliminate the chance of continuous re-infection. Scrub down the bathroom with 10% bleach solution. Wash all the bed linens in disinfectant soap. Spray down your bare mattress with Lysol and let it dry before putting new linens on. Put all your pillows in the dryer and roast them on high heat for an hour each, or better yet, burn them and get new. Do your skivvies in hot water and dry with high heat.

Keep yourself scrupulously clean. Shower with soap after every bowel movement.

Eat one-serving foods (except if on the purification diet listed below) and keep no leftovers. Run your dishwasher on it's highest heating and hot-washing cycles.

Lay in a supply of Gatorade. Do not chill it. You don't need to make your body work harder to warm up cold liquids you are putting into it.

Here is the risky part. Get some water-purifying tablets or drops. Make up an amount that will purify
10 quarts (liters) of water. With the tablets, you crush them with something in the bottom of a shot glass. Carefully fill the shot glass with water and stir, dissolving the tablets. If drops are used, they will self-mix as you add the water.

Horn the contents of the shot glass. DO NOT CHASE IT WITH ANYTHING. DO NOT SPIT OUT ANY RESIDUE, SWALLOW IT ALL.

Lay down for about four hours, then start in on the Gatorade, taking it as small as you must to keep it down. Try to manage at least a quart every 6 hours.

Stay on the Gatorade diet (NO FOOD!) for two days.

On the third day, eat one pint of plain yogurt. Not the fruity kind, PLAIN YOGURT. Continue with the Gatorade for another day, then slowly introduce SMALL amounts of food back in your life. What you are doing here is killing off all the digestive bacterial in your gut. You will kill the evil ones that are causing the problem as well. With all the bacteria gone, the gut can't do it's job, so any food in there will not digest. So, don't put any in. Just gatorade for survival, it will keep you going (or Pedialyte, it's better but way more expensive). Eating the yogurt next re-introduces the Lacto-bacillus Acidophillus, the good digestive bacteria, back into the gut. It will grow rapidly (if you've waited the two days for the killer-compound to be flushed out by the Gatorade, if not, the compound will negate the yogurt).

Start with the B.R.A.T. diet: Bananas, rice (plain) applesauce and tea. Or the B.O.A.T. diet, which is the same but substitutes oatmeal for rice. Saltine crackers are a decent substitute also.

After two days successful on these diets, try bringing in eggs, and a little fat (butter or some light fat). Then step up to meats.

The key is quantities. Your GI tract and colon will get into a reactive mode called enteritis and colitis, where it shits everything right out (so you don't get the food value out of it). You have to combat that by not overloading the tract and colon. Small meals, fed often, will get you adequate nutrition to recover.

By the end of the bout, you will have lost a lot of weight, which your body will try to compensate for by storing carbs and fats faster. Let it work. This isn't a weight-reduction program, and if you stay underweight too long, organ damage might occur.

BTW, the Halzone tablet amoeba-killer deal works. I have friends who used this remedy in 'Nam. The docs knew it was being used, and said nothing, so it can't be all that bad for you.

You've got a serious disease, but this is one that will actually respond to non-medical intervention.

If you let the docs treat it in the ER or Urgent Care (if they will, they might just pass it off as some gut virus and let you suffer it out). If they treat it properly, they will give you (IV) a strong antibiotic, replacement fluids and morphine and phenergan. That does everything quickly, but you will still have some residual trots until your gut gets rid of all it's previous infected waste. Then they put you on a clear diet (Gatorade), then the BOAT or BRAT diet, etc.

Then you pay their bill, $2,000 thank you. Plus about $250 worth of antibiotics to go home with. If they decide to do a CAT scan of your gut, add another $4,500 to that bill.

Two ways to go, the docs or the home-remedy way.

BTW, the cleanliness regime applies to either program.