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I'm Sick

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I'm Sick
eleanor
08/06/02 at 01:58:18
Bismillahi Rahmani Raheem

[slm] wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh

In case anyone was wondering why the sudden increase in my posting, there is a simple explanation - I am home sick  :(

Maybe some of you can identify with me in this sickness and maybe mwishka can give the scientific aspect of it? *hint hint*

Well for years and years now (in fact my earliest memory of it is 9yrs old) I have been suffering from heartburn. A form of indigestion.
It is an awful burning feeling that I get in my stomach and osophegus. (sp?). So I have just learned to live with it. Avoid foods that set it off, and if it does occur then to drink milk or eat some chewing gum, to calm it down again.
A few years ago I got really fed up of it and went to the doctor. He sent me for an endescopy. (NOT much fun :( ), which proved inconclusive. I had no ulcer or similar, but some bacteria were discovered in my stomach which were causing harm. As far as I can remember, the doctor gave me a course of antibiotics and that was all.
Then about 6 mths ago I went to the doctor again. Said I was still suffering. He sent me for ANOTHER endescopy  ::) and again they found these harmful bacteria. He prescribed three different types of antibiotics which totally zapped me for a week. I made good friends with the toilet that week.  :P Then he prescribed a course of tablets which were supposedly to repair the stomach lining. While on those tablets I felt great. I could eat anything and never got heartburn. As soon as the course finished, the old symptoms came back again  :'(
So I resigned myself to the problem and said I'd just have to live with it.
Yesterday it got bad. I started vomiting the stomach acid. It came gurgling up into my mouth. My body went into "shock" mode. I was freezing cold, wobbly in the leg dept., felt so so nauseous  :'(, and I was at college. Somehow I struggled home, getting out on the way home to be sick, and fell into bed and slept for about 2 and a half hours. When I woke up I had a temp. of 38.4°C and was very weak. My husband came home in the meantime, immediately gave me paracetemol, which got rid of the headache and temperature, and slowly I started to recover. It's now 8am here and at 9 the doctor's is open. So I'm going to go there and see what he says....

Thank you for letting me share my story of woe with you all  :'(

wasalaam
eleanor
Re: I'm Sick
dirt
08/06/02 at 04:37:49
[slm]

Hey, I just want to say that you sound like you have what my dad has.  I think it's called acid reflux or something of that nature.  Anyway, he takes some medication for it that clears it up completely.  I think it's called Prilosec (though I'm not exactly sure).  This is a very serious problem and if you allow it to continue, the acid from your stomach will start eating away at your esophagus.  Please please please, get this problem fixed.  If your current doctor isn't helping, go to another one.  If that one doesn't help, go to another one.  If that one doesn't help......well, you get the picture.

Now I'm no doctor but what you are experiencing sounds eerily like what my dad has so I did a little background checking on the net and found a site you may be interested in.  

LOOK AT THIS LINK!!!
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V

[url]http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health/digest/pubs/heartbrn/heartbrn.htm[/url]

^
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LOOK AT THIS LINK!!!

If I am right about your problem then you should know that with proper medication and/or treatment, you can live a normal life again, insha'Allah.  My father lives a completely normal life now due to proper diagnosis and treatment.  It's worth looking into.  I will make dua for you.

[wlm]
08/06/02 at 04:42:26
dirt
Re: I'm Sick
dirt
08/06/02 at 04:48:23
[slm]

Here is another link I found for you.  It's worth checking out.

[url]http://www.gerd.com/faq/gerd-faq.htm[/url]

[wlm]

Re: I'm Sick
eleanor
08/06/02 at 04:48:27
[slm]

well the doctor has prescribed me something or other and has informed me I have to have another endoscopy  :o  I have to wait till the end of August though, because all the endoscopy doctors are on holiday. So he said anyway. I find it a bit hard to believe that ALL of them are on holiday but still....
Thanks for the link, Bro Dirt. It was very very informative and described my problem exactly - even down to the foods which cause irritation!

Re: I'm Sick
dirt
08/06/02 at 05:07:25
[slm]

Hey no problem.  I just want to help.  I hate seeing people suffer needlessly and your problem sounded so much like my father's.  May Allah SWT make you all better.     :)

[wlm]
08/06/02 at 05:07:55
dirt
Re: I'm Sick
Maliha
08/06/02 at 07:27:11
[slm]
Sorry to hear that Sis:(
May Allah grant you shifaa and Mercy Inshaallah.. (Amin).

Sis,
Maliha.
Re: I'm Sick
EdisonShi
08/06/02 at 07:39:43
Hope everything is properly diagnosed and treated this time around.  Does not sound pleasant and I'll be thinking of you.
Re: I'm Sick
Muneerah134
08/06/02 at 11:37:15
[slm]
Sister Eleanor,
I am sorry to hear of your illness. My mother suffers from similar symptoms and takes the same medication Brother Dirt's dad takes. I think it is called Prilosec. It has given her relief. InshaAllah the MDs will get to the bottom of it and treat you sucessfully also.
There is a du'a for visiting the sick (usually said seven times), and even though I can't "see" you, inshaAllah it is still appropriate:
[i]As'alullahal 'Azeema Rabbal 'Arshil 'Azeemi an yashfiyaka.
I ask Almighty Allah, Lord of the Magnificent Throne, to make you well.[/i]
Ameen
:-) Muneerah
Re: I'm Sick
siddiqui
08/06/02 at 11:48:08
[slm] sr
Did they diaganose just H.pylori, or did they speak something of a chronic regurgitation- barrets esophagous or a hiatus hernia
May Allah give you shifaa
Please wait for three to 4 hours after a meal before you lie down
prefreably go for a walk
[wlm]
Re: I'm Sick
Fatimah
08/06/02 at 11:49:56
[slm]
sis eleanor, Ill keep you in my dua inshaAllah. Hopefully you will feel better soon. Remember that if any harm touches a believer..even a prick of a thorn, sins are removed and it highers your degrees..just be patient.
Take care and please let us know how you are doing...
[slm]
Re: I'm Sick
BroHanif
08/06/02 at 17:36:14
salaams

Have you tried slightly changing your diet ???? My diet previously before I had stomach problems was pretty much geared towards the Asian dishes. Rich in oil and ghee and low in the healthy stuff. Some time ago my stomach said thats enough and I started to ahve similiar problems to what your having.

Wen to Doc and he said if you want to have a healthy living stya off the Asian dishes. He also prescribed me some Gaviscon which helps the heartburn and the stomach cramps.

So after a complete overhaul of my diet things are looking better I can now have the occasional curry dish and it won't upset my stomach. Yet I find if I drink enough milk in the day then that can also help cool the lining of the stomach. Take some milk at night before you go to sleep and see how your stomach feels in the morning.

I hope it helps

Salaams

Hanif
Re: I'm Sick
mwishka
08/06/02 at 18:00:41
oh sis eleanor...i feel so bad for you... :'(

it sounds like a terrible experience...

ya my mom has this problem, to combined with a hiatal hernia.

um about the medicine...what it does is interrupt the signalling pathway telling the stomach to produce acid.  so, as you might guess, this is a good things symptomatically for your relief, but not such a good thing in terms of overall digestion. we need our stomach to be an acidic pH of ~2 so it can play its role in digestion.  so, this gets complicated when you have a different need, meaning the stomach fluids are going UP, where they don't belong, and burning tissues which are not lined properly to handle the pH, and you don't have any choice but to just force the stomach wall cells to cut it out with the acid production.....

(he he if you saw my ummah post, you know i seem to be not quite coherent - so i'm um kind of giving you the quick and easy and um maybe even a little bit careless version of this scenario.....)

ok, now about Heliobacter pylori, the bacteria that siddiqui was referring to.  it's only been confirmed in the last couple of years that people prone to ulcers carry these bacteria naturally.  this is the reason your doctor gave you antibiotics, and these are the bacteria in your stiomach.  H. pylori are among the bacteria that have been studied in "bacterial film" studies --- instances of bacteria existing in environments in which it seems they couldn't.

how do they survive in your stomach?  it takes a lot of martyrdom, and i'm not kidding!  here's what they do:  a small population sequesters itself in a niche in your stomach lining.  as the colony grows, individuals sacrifice themselves to enable the rest to continue - they take up positions at the surface of the colony and die, due to the extreme acidity of the envirnment outside their little alcove.....i think they kind of explode, allowing their poor tiny bodies to provide a neutralizing wall to protect their community from the acid "outside".  it's really pretty amazing!

um not to make their survival seem more important than YOUR well- being, sis, but you gotta admit they go to great lengths just to survive - and they certainly don't have as a goal to make you sick....   :(

i'd suggest not taking this medicine non-stop, meaning i think it sounds like the kindof thing that would do a very good job at what it does, but i think you might want to allow equilbration periods, a return to normal function at least once in a while, maybe even just for short periods of time....

sis eleanor, anything we add to our systems as "medicine" is only a product of someone's clever effort to mess something up - usually mess up a bad process, but most of our processes are SO interconnected it's not very easy to isolate a single bad effect, cut just that one out, and have no damage or disruption down the usual chain of events that step was a part of.  as i said here once before somewhere, THAT is actually what these things we call "side effects" are.  they aren't problems the medicine itself causes, they're the ways in which the medicine INTEREFERES in our body, messing stuff up while it gets involved chemically in the one little task or step it was designed to "help" with.

those um newer "arthritis" medicines, interestingly are related to these medicines that mess with stomach acid, in the chain of events they interfere with.  one works on cox 1 gene products and one works on cox 2 products.  one, in doing that, causes damage to the stomach lining - really bad damage.  the other one doesn't.  one can interfere with ovulation.  the other one doesn't.  but they do similar work and APPEAR to work the same way.

oops wow have to go - have to turn off the nitrogen...

mwishka
Re: I'm Sick
Julie
08/06/02 at 19:24:22
[color=Purple]HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER SOON, ELEANOR.
Some flowers to cheer you up:

:-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-*

Julie :)[/color]
Re: I'm Sick
UmmWafi
08/07/02 at 09:36:36
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((ELLIE)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

I have been very ill too..but hey we aint here to swap illness stories wot ?

Love ya lots habibti

Olin
Re: I'm Sick
Kathy
08/07/02 at 18:15:32
[quote]..but hey we aint here to swap illness stories wot ?[/quote]

:-)Momma is here to listen...

It always feels good to have people send you messages of care....

Umm Wafi... what is wrong?

08/07/02 at 18:16:51
Kathy
Re: I'm Sick
UmmWafi
08/08/02 at 00:40:07
[slm] Momma

How are things in the great US of A ?  I hope u and ur family are doing well in the Blessings of Allah.

Nuthin new here really just that I have postponed me kidney scan for a while now and me think me is not doing so well in that area.  Cos of the neglect to me kidneys, me wake up with pounding headaches every single day, yowsa.  Plus me chest pains are increasing. Me is puttin off me meds cos me is sick of taking drugs (plus a herbal doc once told me that me body is toxin laden wooohoooo).  Add to all that me constant missing of me lovely kids and the heavy demands of me coursework.

Phew..did I say all that in one breath ? Heh.

So that is me diagnosis compressed in one paragraph.  Other than that, well..uhh...

Thank u for caring Sis Kathy, may Allah Bless You with His Infinite Mercy and Love.

Wassalam

Olin (the one who should be cutting down on her chocolate intake prolly)
Re: I'm Sick
eleanor
08/08/02 at 03:48:20
[slm]

oh Olin.. I am so sorry to hear you are so ill  :( It makes me feel selfish for feeling sick when others are going through far worse things :( Insha Allah you will get through this unscathed and your rewards will be mighty. Please don't delay your treatments any longer Sis, it's important that you stay on top of this..

As for me - many thanks to all who made dua, sent well-wishes etc. Your kind thoughts cheered me up immensely. The tablets that the doc prescribed are for a gastric reflux disorder, but don't ask me how they work. He said that the tablets alone may clear up the problem. It is a course of fifteen days, so, gullible as I may be, I don't believe that that's the end of it.
Bro Hanif, you may be right about the spicy dishes. I do seem to eat almost only Asian dishes, due to having one hungry husband who only seems to be happy with roti. If it's not spicy, it's not food. And you know how much saalann is made on one occasion - yep a big potful. So it seems silly to make a big curry and then make something different for myself. Not to mention more expensive. My doctor didn't seem to think that spicy foods had caused the problem, but may be an aggravation. I do drink plenty of milk and that helps too. That and yoghurt.

I just feel so tired all the time :( I don't know if that is linked to the problem or not. Tiredness, lethargy, low blood pressure....

Anyhow, thanks again to you all; you truly are a wonderful Ummah :)

wasalaam
eleanor
Re: I'm Sick
Ghetto_Hijabi
08/08/02 at 12:45:20
[slm] Eleanor,

*hugz* I hope you're feeling better.  My mom has severe heartburn as well, and our homeopathic doctor recommended that she squeeze fresh lemon juice into a cup and then mix it with water.  Apparently it really helps in getting rid of the heartburn...you might want to try it out..

:-* GH


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