| This won't help the guys out there, but I wanted to share some of my personal experiences that I've found helpful in dealing with UC. I was diagnosed midway thru my senior year in college. I was first put on a small dosage of Asacol, which worked initially. Thru the summer I stopped responding to the drug and became progressively worse. I tried just about every drug under the sun. Finally my doctor put me on a combination of Colazal and mesalamine suppositories, which gave me the first signs of relief in months. Unfortunately my flare-ups still occurred occasionally, but at that point I started noticing that they followed a pretty regular cycle - 2-3 weeks of improvement, 1-2 weeks of progressive worsening and extreme symptoms. The 1-2 weeks of worsening always corresponded with my off-week for birth control. I asked my doctor if there had been any research done on the relationship between estrogen/menstrual cycles and colitis...he of course said no, probably because he had no idea. Like any other good biology grad student, I went and looked up the research myself and read the papers written by colitis researchers. Turns out there is work that has investigated the relationship between estrogen and colitis flare-ups. Nothing extremely conclusive, but they've found evidence that estrogen makes flare-ups worse. I got off of birth control, just to see if it worked. It's now been about 3 months since I've been off it, and for the first time since my diagnosis, I have started to feel "normal." I still have some of the symptoms - the bleeding hasn't totally stopped, but it's extremely minor. The bloating and cramps, the extreme, frequent, incapicitating flare-ups with huge amounts of blood and mucous have almost completely stopped. I'm still on Colazal for preventitive/maintenance purposes, but I'm now only taking four pills/day, whereas 3 months ago I was taking 9 pills/day, + 1 suppository every night, 2-3 weeks every month. Don't know if this will help anyone, but I wanted to put it out there. Good luck. |