Hi friends,
By no means am I cured, but I've had some positive signs. Firstly, let me explain my "pain cycle": For me, the BM is not very painful at all. The pain hits me about one hour after the BM, and it will last for several hours. What I've been doing is immediately when I wake up in the morning (~5AM), I take 600mg Ibuprofen in anticipation of the upcoming pain (I've learned that you really need to stay in front of the pain). This is typically sufficient to make the rest of the day manageable, although I do on rare occasions take another 600mg around noon.
Well, I've noticed a subtle decline in the pain in the last couple weeks, and last week I had a few days with no pain at all. I decided to not take pain medication yesterday or today so that I could get a sense of where my pain was at. Yesterday the pain was ~3 (0 to 10 scale, 10 being imminent suicide as a result of extreme pain). Today the pain is ~1. I guess less pain equals more healing ? I don't know, but at least there's some ray of hope.
I am doing one thing differently. Some of you may recall that I had a sigmoidoscopy a couple weeks ago. The knowledgable nurse that performed the procedure seemed very familiar with AF's and all the suffering they cause. She told me to begin using large quantities of those gummy-fibers. From her experience over the years, she said that the texture of these gummy-fibers had a tendency to make stool form even more smoothly than conventional fibre sources alone. I took her advice and immediately picked up a bottle. The recommended dosage on the bottle is 2/day(2 gummy = 20% daily fibre intact). I'm taking 8/day, and I'm spacing them out about 2 every couple hours.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will help keep the healing going.....I'll report back soon