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A ****** story.

Hi, let me start by saying that i am a 23 year old borderline obese male 185cm tall weighing 93 kilograms at the moment.
I have been having issues with my digestion for years, i probably ruined my intestinal bacteria with antibiotics for mundane stuff like colds and stuff completely unrelated to antibiotic treatments, sometimes not even respecting the dosage or taking only one pill, mainly because of my mother who felt like she was qualified to be my doctor.
   As i've said i had digestive issues all my life, gas, abdominal pains, and horrible stomach pains for years followed by the monthly diarrhea but these all started to subside and eventually stop a few, maybe 5, years ago.
But since 2011 a different kind of problem had taken the empty spot of those that eventually faded away and that is my bowel movements had gotten weird.
It all started in 2011 innocently enough, i always had one bowel movement per day but as my schedule changed to waking up more in the afternoon than in mornings and as my daily routines changed to working and agitation rather than sitting at school all day long so did my bowel movements change to twice a day or three times a day and that's not the only thing, in the past i was having tough stools with a certain smell to them and now i was having soft stools with the smell you would come across in fermented fruit or vegetables.
In time the stools became quite foul too in smell alternating or in between foul and fermented and there was another thing i had not noticed before, mucus.
Horrible slimy white, transparent, yellow or brown mucus was present in all of my bowel movements the trend being that i had a few weeks of fermented mucous foul stools and then a period of relative normality or i would have soft stools today and normal looking stools tomorrow or soft stools in the morning and normal stools in the evening.
This all persisted for a long time, a whole summer to be exact and in the month October of 2011 i had my first shock and most important shock that i gambled upon, i went once in the morning producing a big fermented hard stool then i came back home around lunchtime and felt the need to go again, i of course went to the bathroom to relieve myself expecting either a normal stool or diarrhea but what i found was neither, it was a thinner longer stool with strands of mucus on it and on the mucus i found a 2 spots of blood.
I understandably became quite distressed at the sight and went to my general practitioner who told me that it was probably hemorrhoids of whom i did have symptoms or it is intestinal blood because of the large stool and because i don't chew well enough, the doctor there ( who was quite young) told me that i should monitor the situation and if it happens again i should come back to her.
It didn't happen again, i looked closely at my stool for months with external light so that i don't miss anything, and there was no blood, tough there was still quite a bit of mucus and i often had soft stools with that dreaded fermented smell and foul tinge.
I was a nervous wreck at this point but i started calming down, i figured my emotional state may be the reason for my issues, and it might have been a part of them, my colon seemed to calm down too because the whole years 2012 and 2013 were better, 2 stools per day still softer than in my past for the most part, yet the mucus became less and less apparent and the smell was also better, i still had the occasional 1 -2 weeks of issues but not like in the past ,so i thought that my problems were ending. ( i was no longer stressed as much)
The only real issue i had in 2012 is that at some point because i had eaten a few fermented lemons with sugar i had a incredible mass of gas and fermentation form and give me nearly insufferable pains and when i eliminated it i found some blood and mucous in the toilet but i didn't pay it any mind since well i had not felt that kind of pain in my life, i thought that the situation explained itself.
2013 was mostly good except the month of December when i started having fermentation, and mucus and severe irritation of the anus when i went for nr 2, for nearly 2 weeks.
After about 10 days of this i had a period of 30 days which was 100 % normal, no smells no mucus nothing.
Then, 15 January 2014, it started again, i ate amongst other things cabbage salad, fried potatoes ( boiled then fried in little oil only for the taste) and then two times cabbage preserved with salt which i suspect was a bit moldy, and one time spinach which i think put the final nail in my verbal coffin.
It started slowly, just a little bit of mucus, just a little smell of fermentation until i was having incredibly smelly fermented stools with a lot of white then yellow and now yellow-brown mucus, which irritated my anus when being expelled in the toilet. They immediately improved after i started drinking peppermint tea and for the first time in many years i started to suspect my enemy was small intestine bacterial overgrowth.
I even had one time doing only mucus after i had taken a stool ( it was completely transparent without any blood or any pigment), it happened once 2 weeks ago and i was having other issues it happened after i ate spinach which ended up fermenting heavily over the next 2 days.
However i have no idea what it is :D. Even drinking peppermint tea doesn't help 100 %, it seems to make the fermentation be less of a problem but fermentation still happens every few days, my stools after drinking it had no visible amounts of mucus but, now after a few days, have slight amounts of yellow-brown mucus on them, my stools are anything from yellow to dark brown and i often find parts of undigested matter visible on them, the thing that stands out is how pristine this undigested matter often is, like it's barely changed color, ive found no blood but im wondering where this yellow to brown mucus is coming from and more importantly why it is there. I do have an internal hemorrhoid or whatever it is because i cant even tell if its a hemorrhoid or not since it does not bleed, anyway its really small like half a centimeter so i'm not worried about it yet.
Another weird thing is that now after starting to drink peppermint tea, the smell of my stools is distinct, foul and fermented combined with a unique smell to it maybe because of the tea itself, i know that foul smells could be due to bleeding somewhere in the digestive system but i've seen no traces of blood on my stools or in the mucus, and believe me i've looked.
So yea, i don't know what to say, its fermentation combined with foul smell combined with mucus which is usually transparent but sometimes white and rarely yellow-brown, happening to me every once in a while maybe once every 2 months sometimes more often and for less than the recent episodes that had me on and off for weeks. I do have heartburn but not always. My bowel movements are like an alarm clock, always at certain hours with rare exceptions. I don't really have any pain except the occasional gas pains which are usually followed by gas or the sound/feeling of gas moving down the intestine.
I figure it's not something deadly like cancer since about 3 years have passed since the symptoms appeared, id be dead by now i guess and the symptoms never really progressed anywhere, just episodes of these fermentation's. I did eat a lot of vegetables when the symptoms first appeared ( 3 months spent mainly on a vegetable diet, maybe i caused this.
What could it be.
Best Answer
Avatar universal
MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL
Hi, understand your anxiety. Excess gas can sometimes cause abdominal discomfort and pain. Probiotics contain good bacteria and help with digestion. And Prebiotics are nondigestible carbohydrates that act as food for probiotics. Probiotics are found in foods such as yogurt, while prebiotics are found in whole grains, bananas, onions, garlic, honey and artichokes. A combination of two in a healthy diet is beneficial. Try this. In general, too much fat or sugar-like substances and insufficient fiber aggravate symptoms. Intolerance to milk products is also known.Infection – A bowel infection like gastroenteritis can over-sensitize the bowel and result in symptoms. So, try to avoid triggering factors. Choose a more relaxed approach to your problem and treat your symptoms as and when they occur. Regards.
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Avatar universal
Hi, thanks for the reply and reading all that, i think you are spot on.
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