Normal Again!

Juli's U/S showed everything to be normal, as well as all her blood tests. It is not Celiac, Crohn's, hepatitis or other liver impairment, or inflammatory bowel disease of any kind. Normal, normal, normal. Personally, I'm thrilled that it's not a brain tumor or any of the above problems. But now she is again beginning to question whether this is "all in her head," a product of anxiety and/or panic.

Having witnessed her illness first-hand last month, my mother-instinct still says that the anxiety and panic come AFTER the vomiting starts, not before. On our trip to LA, there was no behavioral trigger, nothing but happiness and joy at being able to go visit her Gran. She had a little cold coming on, and then suddenly the vomiting started and everything went to hell in a hurry.

She has been faithfully doing the exercises in the anxiety workbooks and following the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy guidelines, which is one of the only proven successful treatments in psychotherapy.

Here's one gem: "Write down all the things you are fearful of."

Well, let's see...I'll start vomiting and won't be able to stop, I'll get horribly dehydrated and will have to go to the hospital, feel miserable for days, and finally be let go, terribly weak and frail, and be tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Then I'll be fine for X amount of time and it will happen again and again.

The Workbook says: "Now that you see your fears written down, don't they seem a little silly? Isn't it unrealistic that any of your fears will actually happen?"

Actually, no. Experience says that it WILL happen, as it has in the past.

So, the CBT isn't working, because the reality is that she is physically sick and the worst case scenario keeps happening to her over and over again. I'd be panicked too. Any reasonable person would, given the situation.

So we continue on the ruling out of all the possible organic causes of her gastric distress. If everything continues to come back as normal, we are left with...abdominal migraine. It is very, very rare in adults, but Juli's Dr. Casabona brought it up as a possibility at her intake interview. It is a diagnosis of exclusion, (every other possible cause has to be checked and ruled-out), but not a hopeless one--it can be treated and even prevented, using beta-blocker and triptan drugs.

So while Juli gets discouraged, her husband Kerne and I become more convinced that an answer will be found soon, and her problem will be able to be fixed or at least controlled. We'll just keep plugging away until we get some answers.