My Symptoms Didn't Seem SIBO-Related

Getting the diagnosis that I had Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) — an imbalance of certain bacteria in my intestines — didn't happen overnight. In fact, everything I learned about my condition has been like peeling the proverbial onion, one layer after another. The troubling symptoms that first sent me to the doctor didn't seem like a gut issue:

• Nightly leg cramps
• Tingling in my hands
• Numbness in my feet
• Hair loss
• Always feeling cold
• Weight gain (despite being on a restricted diet)
• Constipation
• Various skin rashes
• Vitamin deficiencies (despite taking supplements)

All of these were symptoms that my previous doctor of eight years had dismissed. He implied they were just part and parcel of menopause. But I hadn't actually begun menopause yet.

My new doctor did not dismiss the symptoms, especially the vitamin deficiencies. She jumped in right away with a slew of tests to systematically rule out one condition after another — from hypothyroid to diabetes to anemia to pernicious anemia — then, honing in on the constipation symptom, she referred me to a gastro specialist to see if perhaps IBS was causing malabsorption.

To my doc's credit, I would never have gone down the IBS path had she not suggested it. Before I became the voracious reader of digestive health info that I've now become, I had a general sense of IBS as being about stomach pain, gas, nausea, GERD, acid stomach and diarrhea, none of which I was experiencing. I'd never heard of IBS-C, the constipation version of IBS, and my constipation was more an occasional annoyance than a real problem, I thought. I recall reading many articles in women's magazines through the years advising that constipation is different for every person and some people go every day or even twice a day and others go every three days and all of these are normal.

Knowing what I now know of course, I take a completely different view. I now know that everyone should be having a bowel movement every day. If we're not being swept clean daily, there's opportunity for overgrowth of the bacterias that commonly reside in the gut and we're not ridding our body of the endotoxins created by those bacteria.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. My next step was testing.