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Wellness Wednesday for February 14, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Continuing my saga of trying to solve my chronic joint pain…

Got a ton of lab work done, including an ultrasound, pancreatic enzymes, H27BLA, stool test—all normal except extremely low pancreatic elastase in stool (32). Ultrasound was normal, but pancreas appeared heterogenous (non specific finding, suppose it could be gas or something). Stool test was weird because fat content was low/normal and protein was normal high but elastase was low regardless. Normal blood sugar but higher fasting insulin than I would like (7.9).

Doctor has me on oregano oil and allicin assuming SIBO and has ordered an MRI to rule out pancreatic etiology. These supplements are kicking my ass and causing not only a lot of bloating, but upper right abdominal pain I’ve had on and off the last 10 years of my life.

Needless to say, I’m struggling. The physical discomfort from the SIBO treatment is a huge anxiety trigger. I’ve started wondering whether I’m looking at something life changing like pancreatic cancer and I’m increasing feeling like I’m staring over this void. I’m trying to manage the anxiety through meditation and therapy but a physical trigger is extremely hard to ignore.

I’m 32 male, no family history of pancreas issues. I’m really struggling with all of this, I’m attempting to just keep moving forward but it’s really hard.