Day 1
The first trick (after driving on the other side of the road, dealing with a different currency, parking, etc.) is to find the place. They basically have a secret entrance, which I think is pretty cool. They buzzed me upstairs and I met Annie, who gave me some handouts, and then brought me to their second location (across the street, above a health store, also a somewhat secret location) where I would have my final lavage. There, I met my nurses for the day. They were both very nice and professional.
They both helped perform my lavage, which made me realize I'd had the wrong kind done in Massachusetts before I left. I finally understood what they meant between a closed and open system, even though I could have sworn I had chosen the right one from the website. But no matter. They said I had one of the cleanest colons they'd ever seen! I seemed to mostly be filled with gas, thanks to, for whatever reason, the particularly dramatic reaction my intestines seem to have to the pressure changes that go along with airplane travel. That made me feel pretty good until after it was over and I realized I may have unconsciously been holding things back, so to speak. I still don't really understand the nitty-gritty logistics of it (how does it get to where it needs to be if you're not fasting and your colon doesn't remain empty the whole time?!), but hopefully I was clean enough and everything will turn out well.
Luckily, this kind of lavage was relatively more pleasant than the first one, and before I knew it, I was meeting my new friends. There were quite a bit of them, it seemed, all drawn up in a pretty big syringe. This was inserted and followed by a similar amount (55 ml) of saline to push them along. Afterwards, one of the nurses massaged along the length of my colon with the goal of depositing the transplant into the cecum. Again, I'm not sure how enough bypasses what's already there, but she seemed to think she was successful and could feel it moving along (I really need to work on my palpation skills). Afterwards, you lie on your back with your feet above your head, then switch to lying on your right, and then finally they reverse the incline and you're seated, with each of these positions lasting ten minutes. This follows the path of your colon. Supposedly, after twenty minutes, the colonization has taken place, but you're still supposed to retain it as long as possible.
The retention is something I seem to be struggling with. I managed to go about six hours without having a bowel movement (it was difficult), and after that experienced several episodes of diarrhea that night. The idea is that if you go into the procedure a little dehydrated (which I was), your colon should absorb the liquid in the transplant and the subsequent flush. My colon seems to be struggling with that. In the hours following the procedure, I am definitely very aware that a pure liquid has been inserted directly into my colon. Not the most pleasant experience.
For the rest of the day, we just wandered around Hitchin (with my mom, who came with me for the first few days) and went into the occasional store. It's a cute little town and there will be a few activities I'll do over the next two weeks, but it's definitely going to be slow. We finished our trip with a stop at the grocers, Waitrose, and headed home to read (my number one activity for the next several days) and cook dinner.
I experienced the aforementioned diarrhea in addition to quite a bit of rumbling, as I was told might happen. Nothing too major in any direction just yet.
Day 2
My appointment was later in the day this time, so we checked out Brookman's Place, a town near the apartment I rented. We walked the few blocks and then headed into a butcher store. The butcher was really nice and he had a good selection. There was no real mention of organic or grass-fed (interestingly, in the UK, an organic certification also means the animals have to spend a certain minimum amount of time outside, on grass), but at the very least, everything was cut right there, so there will be less preservatives than what we've found in the grocery stores so far (it's alarming how many fresh meat products in the stores contain ingredient lists at all, let alone lots of bolded allergen information).
That was our only stop in town, so then we headed to the Royal Veterinary College, which I'd only realized was nearby the night before. We walked around campus, said hi to their horses, and tried to visit their t-shirt shop, only to find that the few hours it opened coincided with when I needed to be at the clinic.
It was nice to see a whole university campus devoted to a vet school. Their dining options were impressive, they had so much history, there was a big emphasis on mental health, there was plenty of on-campus housing, and there were just so many people (and even lots of males!) lolling about on the grounds in the middle of the day. It made me a little sad for what I missed out on by basically going to a much smaller commuter school. I never applied to the Royal College. Instead I applied to Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. At the time I was thinking that if I were to go abroad, I wouldn't want to be in London (should've looked into that more--the area's quite rural...) and I would rather be in Ireland or Scotland - somewhere more familiar (and cheaper, if it had been Ireland). I very seriously considered Edinburgh and declined because I would have had to live in the city and commute 45 minutes by bus to the campus in the suburbs every day. Looking back, I wonder if this school could have won me over if I'd applied. Not that I can find enough fault with my school and my experience to regret it, but it's just one of those instances in life where you make one single decision and it funnels your life off in a direction that's so definitively different from any other path you may have taken and you can't help but look back and wonder, what if...?
But back to the reason I'm here. This time I didn't have to go across the street and instead went to their lavage-free treatment rooms. It went much the same as the first time, though they decreased the amount of the saline flush. Most people also take a prebiotic powder packet home with them after each treatment, but due to my on-again, off-again, never really there but never really not there SIBO, they haven't been giving it to me. However, when I spoke with Dr. Amy Nett just before I left, she encouraged me to eat lots of prebiotics while the treatment was occurring and beyond despite coming up slightly positive for SIBO over the winter, so I've just been adding a little bit of my old Biotagen powder (little compared to the recommended dose, lots compared to the smallest dose I could possibly take almost two years ago when I got it that gave me horrible symptoms) to coconut water.
I was able to retain the treatment for about four hours. After dinner, I experienced some pretty horrid cramping and un-moving gas pains for a couple hours, but then that was it. There was only a little bit of extra rumbling.
Day 3
My appointment was back in the morning, so we had a lazy morning and then made our way to the clinic. I went through the same routine as the day before, only they decreased the saline even more to 30 ml due to me not being able to retain it for very long.
After that, we drove to Cambridge. Throughout the treatment, patients are supposed to take it pretty chill and not try to really make a holiday of it and go galavanting about. That said, I really don't handle instructions like that very well. I need at least one or two things to do a day, and the treatments themselves are pretty short. Luckily, Cambridge isn't that far away and with a car it was very easy to get to. Neither of us really looked into what there is to do in Cambridge, so we got there and just wandered. We happened right onto an open air market. We found some locally grown things, nothing expressly organic, and then just some cool things that I didn't mind breaking my local rules for (because really, how much could the UK offer me in spring when I don't eat white potatoes?) and because it didn't feel that extreme, being in Europe -- Turkish figs, I'm looking at you!
Then we wandered to the river and walked along it. Many of the university buildings were closed for exams (or because it was Friday afternoon, or just because), but otherwise we would've checked out at least one (really I was looking for their gardens). We wandered into some shops and then went to a restaurant called Cau for a late lunch/early dinner that I'd looked up and booked that morning. I'd highly recommend it. Their beef is grass-fed and their allergy accommodation is astounding. Seriously, look at that spreadsheet! While none of the allergies they listed surprised me, I was very surprised that any restaurant would think to cater to them. Of course, they didn't have nightshades listed, but it was very easy to work around that. I had the tapa de cuadril cut of beef, a roasted sweet potato with butter and herbs, and peas with mint. It was probably the cleanest meal I'd ever had in a restaurant--there wasn't even any room for bad oils. If I hadn't been worried about feeding my new friends with refined sugar, I may have even gone ahead and had sorbet for dessert.
After lunch, we wandered around the old streets some more and looked around a bookstore until they kicked us out because it was nearing 6 pm. After that we drove home and all I had for the rest of the day was some tea (I'm really finding I don't have much of an appetite for more than one meal a day here). Oh, and I read a lot. I'm really burning through my book selection.
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