After finishing up three rounds of herbal antibiotics on September 8th I retested for SIBO on the 15th, waiting a week to get the herbs out of my system.  This time I also did a 2 day prep diet to hopefully avoid the very odd results I had at the last test.  Finally had some good news from a test – I made a serious dent in the bacterial levels going from a peak of 49 ppm methane (CH4) to a peak of only 10 ppm methane, that is an 80% reduction in levels.   The other good news this week is that I weighed in at 155.4 on Wednesday, finally crawled up to my interim goal of 155. This is almost 8 lbs up from my low point in May.  Now I’m aiming for 160.  I really don’t know if I’ll ever get back up to 170 given the low carb diet I’m going to have to stay on but when I was in really good shape running I was at 165 so I’m ultimately shooting for that.

Here are my test results from early August (left) and my one from September (right), you can see a huge reduction in the levels of methane and a slight drop in hydrogen:

The methane is still hiding some hydrogen since the M.smithii critters eat the H2 produced by the other bacteria in there so there is a chance that as my methane levels drop to < 3 (the target) the H2 levels will go up suddenly.  The good news is that the hydrogen producing bacteria are easier to kill.

Starting today I’m back on herbal antibiotics after a three week rest to try and deliver the knock out punch and get that methane level all the way down.   I’m expecting it to take around 40 days but I may have to go another 60 to totally wipe it out.   The odd thing is that during that last round I started to feel bad the last week of it and actually  felt pretty bad after finishing up so I may have had some more bacterial growth in the few weeks since the test and that will require a bit more time.  Still, I’m confident that with another two months that this can be beaten all the way to the mat.

Dr. Keller at the SIBO Center also suggested starting Resolor a few weeks in to try and flush my small intestine better since I’ve still got the bacteria pretty high up in my system. I’m a bit leery of trying this since it evidently has only been tested with women and is not recommended for use in men by the European and the UK drug agencies where it is approved.   It is still not approved in the US at all.   I will probably stick with my homemade MotilPro and LDN as pro kinetic drugs to keep the intestines moving.

Now that the SIBO in getting reduced I am trying to deal with these other complications that came on top of it.   My feet are still numb, some days worse than others but overall I can live with the general level of neuropathy I have if it doesn’t keep progressing.   I can still walk, wade and ride my bike even if I may not be able to run again.  Still hoping that this will clear as the methane clears out of my system but after 6 months of numbness and damage I have my doubts it will come back.

The new complication is in my arms however and this has me more concerned than the feet.   Around the end of August I had a few days where it felt like I’d just done a bunch of push-ups, my muscles were sore and weak feeling.   It went away.  A few weeks later it happened again.  I attributed it to fishing and high sticking my tenkara rod too much.  It went away.  Then last week it stopped going away and now I have a pretty much continuous ache/soreness from my shoulders down to my elbows on both arms though the right is worse than the left.

This could be as simple as some nerve compression in my neck, I have a really tight and sore neck at about C4/C5 which is where the nerve that feeds these muscles comes out at.  It could also be EBV doing more damage or it could be fibromyalgia given the prevalence of that with SIBO patients but my doctor wants to be sure that this isn’t MS or another central nervous system disorder.   Given I have the two apparent precursors to MS – EBV and leaky gut – it seems that checking again for this is probably a good idea though I don’t have a lot of the generalized symptoms of MS.   We increased my low dose naltrexone to 3mg per night (on the way to 4.5 or 5mg per night) in hopes that it would stop the arm weirdness a bit if it was EBV related.  So far, no change after a few nights at this doubled dose so, I’m heading back to the neurologist on Monday to see what we need to do next.