watch me do the happy dance

I know, I know, I owe y'all a whole bunch of interesting posts with pretty pictures. But before I get to that I need to tell you why I'm dancing.

I spent some time in the doctor's office today discussing the results of my colonoscopy and guess what? It's official, I DO have a form of colitis, but it is NOT (NOT!) ulcerative colitis, meaning that it's not a chronic condition and that I will most likely continue to improve (as I have been doing) until I am symptom free. Yay.

Not that you're really that interested, but the results of the endoscopic exam showed a slight inflammation of the entire colon (that's the large intestine) right down to the appendix, but nothing in the ileum, the end of the small intestine. That pretty much rules out Crohn's Disease which usually presents in a different pattern. While the histological report (that's the stuff they do under the microscope after taking tissue samples) also indicated an inflammation with yucky patches of this and that, various lymphocyte thingies and microcrypt doo dads, they feel that it isn't ulcerative colitis but rather something know as infectious colitis brought on by the 10-day course of antibiotics I took for a throat infection waaay back in mid-January before I went in for my hysterectomy. Who knew? I mean of course I know that antiobiotics can play havoc with your digestive system, killing the good bacteria along with the bad, but this thing appearing more than a month after I stopped taking the pills and giving me the German version of Montezuma's Revenge (minus the holiday!) for a whole ten weeks IS pretty weird. I have a feeling my entire system was weakened by the operation and just decided to take a little break without telling me. Losing those pesky tend pounds without even trying was great and I hope I can keep it off, but it wasn't really the right way to go about it now, was it?

I HAVE been feeling a whole lot better these past couple of weeks, though, and my doctor believes that this will indeed go away on its own with the help of probiotics to build up and maintain the intestinal flora. Just today I was reading that non-chronic colitis can take up to three months to heal (Thursday will be exactly three months since this thing reared its ugly head) and six months to really get back to normal. The only caveat they had for me was that sometimes, just sometimes, a first- time bout of ulcerative colitis can masquerade as a self-limiting colitis and that if my symptoms persist or reoccur, that I MUST go and get evaluated again.

I'll be on the lookout, but I really feel that I'm in the clear and ready to get on with it, already. Enough with the sick, I've got a life to live!