I am using Dr Wheatgrass superbalm for healing, along with keeping my stools soft with Miralax and sitz bath at least once a day before bed. I feel like there has been some progress made in 1 week of doing this. The pain is virtually non-existent, however I now feel some itching occasionally. I wanted to check with the people who've been through this to see what are the right signs that your fissure is healing? Does itching mean something? Is the fissure shrinking and drying out?

Tia!

Itchiness can be a sign of healing, absolutely.

Sounds good to me!

Im also curious what signs are that it's NOT healing, and unlikely to. I don't want to keep putting off LIS surgery if it's not getting better. I'm taking a lot of meds to manage this (lidocaine, ibprofen, diltiazem, miralax) and it's hard to function on a regular basis.

Occasionally I have a day where there's almost no pain. Then others I have spasms and it takes many hours before I can go for a walk without pain. Sometimes I get just a trace of blood with a BM, but it otherwise seemed like an untraumatic BM.

I have a hard time not obsessing a bit trying to understand what all these things mean in terms of how well it's healing.

I am taking Miralax everyday to keep my stools soft enough. Have been pain free for three weeks. Also, I am applying dr wheatgrass superbalm and doing sitz baths every night. This weekend I ended up eating bad food which kinda gave me a scare but the miralax kept things smooth fortunately. I will continue this for a while and see where my healing goes. I do not want a surgery.

Pain free for three weeks, that's awesome i envy you! If it's pain free for so long why do you think it still has more healing to do?

I take miralax also. I had to up the dose slightly to avoid the occasional hard stool though.

I've had this issue since the last 6-8 months almost. It only 5 months back that I found out about Miralax which immensely helped, however I stopped taking Miralax and did not actually try to heal the fissure as my doctor only prescribed nupercainal which is more of a pain killer for the bum. When I stopped Miralax, a few weeks later I had another occurrence and it slit again. This happened every few times I stopped taking Miralax. This time I am going with a different approach which involves a slightly long term use of Miralax and use healing methods to help heal the fissure in the long term. 3 weeks in my case is definitely not enough so I will treat it at least for 2 months or 3 months max.

Sounds like you have a good plan in place, I hope it continues to go well.

I think some people on here recommend stool maintenance (i.e. diet & miralax or whatever ppl are using) for very long term, like years, even when it seems otherwise healed. I guess retears are just too easy to happen and worth avoiding.

I agree, that's probably where I went wrong in the past initially. I am going to treat the fissure for 2-3 months and then continue with Miralax for sometime and dose it down with increase in soluble fiber intake.