After years of confusion, I’m even more confused.
3 years ago I went in for chronic diarrhea and a doctor told me the that the only abnormal lab I had was Fecal Elastase, which measured 170.
This led to a CT scan, EUS, Colonoscopy, and lactulose breath test. It led to me seeing 3 different doctors, and it led to Creon.
Nobody agreed on whether or not I had EPI. Imaging results didn’t show pancreas damage. I was positive for SIBO so they gave me rifaximin, but that didn’t help. Neither did the low fodmap diet. By this time I had Epigastric Pain on my left side that radiated to the back (I still do).
Last year I went to a functional medicine doctor, who repeated fecal elastase as part of the GI Map (this was following a year of figuring out my diet to some extent and stopping Creon as instructed by a GI) this time it was 279.
Having tested positive for both types of SIBO and continuing to have symptoms, I went on the Elemental Diet in March of this year. That definitely did something. On the rebound, I was pretty constipated for a week. Then I saw some very healthy looking poops. I continued to eat low fodmap, but my poops slowly started to revert back to being yellow with a slight oily sheen on the surface of the water.
The gas never came back as badly and the poops never went back to floating. What did come back was the nagging epigastric pain.
Now I mentioned that Creon never helped me in the past (nothing ever improved with Creon). I had a bottle of it lying around, so I decided to start taking it again at half the dose I used to take. It seemed to significantly decrease the epigastric pain.
I wanted to repeat the Fecal elastase test, so I did.
Lo and behold, my fecal elastase was 517….
I really don’t know what to make of all this. I know the FET is not always accurate and can fluctuate, but that is a huuuge fluctuation.
If I was going off symptoms alone, I would be reaching the conclusion that SIBO was preventing Creon from working, and now that I’ve cleared the SIBo I need to treat EPI as the root cause (Use porcine enzymes to maintain the correct gut environment to surpress bad bacteria) however the FET results really add an extra confusing layer to that.
Anyone else have the experience of FET results normalizing even when they’re pretty sure something is wrong?