
In 2015 I got C Diff for the first time. I may have always had it in my intestines and this was my first infection, or I could have picked it up during one of my many GI tests in various hospitals. It’s impossible to know for sure.
C Diff is something called a gram-positive bacteria. Gram-positive just means that the cell walls are very thick, making them harder to breach by antibiotics. C Diff can hide in your intestines for a long time due to its ability to produce spores, which are pretty nearly indestructible. When a person takes antibiotics for some other infection they kill off a lot of the microbiota, creating an environment that C Diff can dominate in after the course of antibiotics has passed. C Diff then comes out of spore form and moves into its vegetative form, meaning it is reproducing. At this stage patients experience diarrhea (and other abdominal symptoms). The C Diff is also producing two toxins at this stage. The toxins are how a C Diff Infection (CDI) is detected in a lab test. The toxins also attempt to eat through your colon, which is one of the reasons CDI is so dangerous. This can cause inflammation in the colon called toxic megacolon. If the toxins are able to get through the colon wall then sepsis can occur. This is on top of the danger from dehydration on account of the diarrhea itself.
Most people who get CDI are older people or sick people in hospitals. But community spread amongst younger and healthier people is becoming more and more common. It’s difficult to find good prognosis information for someone in my situation but the death rate from C Diff can run anywhere from 5%-30% depending on who you ask. This is by far the most dangerous illness I have ever faced.
Back in 2015 I didn’t know what C Diff was. I thought I was just having a really bad IBS flare up. I waited 3 weeks before going to the doctor for it. I expected to try some meds for IBS that slow down your intestines but instead the doctor recognised signs of C Diff and tested me for it. A few days later the results came in and it was positive for CDI. It ended up taking me 2.5 months and two different (very strong) antibiotics to finally beat the C Diff. That seems like a long time but as C Diff goes it’s not actually that long. Some people battle for much longer.
If you’ve had CDI once it’s assumed that the C Diff will continue to colonize your digestive tract for the rest of your life. Beating C Diff does not mean eliminating it from your system (due to the spore form). Instead it means your gut microbiome is able to keep the C Diff in line. That also means that every time I need to use antibiotics for anything else I am at higher risk than the rest of the population for getting a C Diff Infection.
I made it 8 years without a recurrence but this month my luck ran out. In October, Eric and I spent a weekend out of town with family and we both came home from that with some sort of viral upper respiratory infection. Eric didn’t miss a single day of work and healed up within about a week just fine. I, on the other hand, was stuck on the couch for 11 or 12 days, unable to make myself a simple lunch, only to eventually find out my virus had morphed into a bacterial sinus infection. That required antibiotics and those antibiotics led to me coming down with this C Diff infection 3 weeks later.
I knew what to look for this time around and I was able to get tested within 24 hours of the diarrhea starting. The test took a further 2 days to come back and then my doctors put me on Vancomycin, a strong antibiotic that doesn’t get absorbed into your bloodstream, which makes it ideal for fighting an intestinal infection. After the course of antibiotics I will have to repopulate my gut microbiome as quickly as possible so that the good stuff can out-compete the C Diff.
It can take anywhere from 3 months to a year for the gut microbiome to recover fully after a C Diff infection, meaning I need to be as careful as possible for a year to not get sick in a way that requires antibiotics. That’s a lot easier said than done. I don’t know what the future will hold but I’m hopeful that I will be able to get this under control fairly quickly since this isn’t my first rodeo.
I know other people with most of my diagnoses but I don’t know very many people who have had C Diff before. So if you’ve had it and are willing to share, reach out to me. I’d love to hear I’m not alone in this fight.
Commentaires