Prairie View

Saturday, January 03, 2009

A New Villain

In the last post about Mom's condition I referred to a nurse's recommendation that we consider beginning to feed her through a stomach tube. I also mentioned that her problems with digestive upset might be a side effect of a powerful antibiotic she was taking.

On Sunday evening (a week ago) while my local siblings and I were together to discuss things, we decided to call our cousin, Leon, who is a general surgeon in Ohio, to seek some input. He mentioned several possibilities that proved to be prescient. He pointed out that if some of these other problems were present, a stomach tube would simply bypass the esophagus, and the problems would be as severe as before. He thought other things should be explored before a stomach tube would be considered.

When he asked what antibiotic she was taking, and we told him Clindamycin, he said that particular one is notorious for creating conditions that favor a clostridium overgrowth. While this is a normal gut bacteria, when an antibiotic such as Clindamycin kills off competing bacteria, and clostridium proliferates, it causes symptoms similar to what Mom was experiencing. It produces toxins that can rot the intestines if this bacteria grows unchecked too long.

Mom did indeed have a clostridium infection, for which she is now taking another antibiotic. The family doctor who saw her on Monday also prescribed an appetite stimulant and a medication to make her esophagus work better. He took her off the Clindamycin immediately. He was able to reassure us that her dehydration and malnutrition was reversible.

The next day was a good day for Mom. She enjoyed eating again--something that had not happened since immediately after she was dismissed from the hospital the second time. Not all the days and nights have been good since then, but she has been able to eat more, and the nausea is gone.

We keep hoping that when Mom gets over the next hump, her healing can accelerate.

I, for one, am weary of lurching from one drug-induced problem to another. It calls to mind what one doctor told my Dad at the hospital. All drugs are poisons. We continue to use them because they have helpful side effects. They obviously have some unhelpful ones as well. While I recognize that Mom needed many interventions beyond nutritional strategies, and I'm grateful that we had access to those options, I can hardly wait to get Mom started again with the good food and nutritional supplements that kept her healthy for 80 years. When taking medicines makes it impossible to do those other good things, my suspicion of them mounts fast.

Kara, my sister-in-law, says her mother, when she had a clostridium infection, had the same kind of confusion my mother exhibited during the night last night. After five rounds of antibiotics, without success in overcoming the problem, an infectious disease specialist recommended an over-the-counter intestinal flora product. When she began taking that, she was able to get ahead of the clostridium overgrowth.

I love it when professionals can look at health situations through more than one paradigm--in this case, not only killing off the bad as antibiotics do, but boosting the good, as probiotics do.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment



<< Home