Gastric empting study

[Capercrohnj]

I'm having another one of these next week eek. It's so long and boring. My last one in November was extremely abnornal

[Capercrohnj]

Test was ok just ling and boring. Had to be off my stomach speed up drug for a few days beforehand so I felt like crap. The results were worse than last time. I had 70% left at 4 hours (10% or less is normal). I had 54% left in November. Anything above 50% is classified as severe gastric delay

[KK77]

I'm sorry you have to endure all this, Caper. I'm not sure how this works but it does sound long and tedious. Do you have private health care? Just wondering if there is more docs could do for you?

[pulisa]

This must be miserable for you, Caper. I presume you are on something like metaclopramide on a permanent basis? My son was born without an oesophagus so I'm aware of this debilitating condition and how important it is to have good gut motility and gastric emptying. The rest of us lucky people just take it for granted.
I hope that your doctors can come up with a decent treatment plan which doesn't involve being hospitalised for a long time.

[Capercrohnj]

I'm in Canada so it is public health care. I'm on domperidone/motilium (the good thing about living in Canada as motilium is readily available). I really should be on a higher dose but I have an ileostomy (i had my colon and rectum removed because of Crohn's) which complicates things because it speeds up the small intestine as well which causes pure fluid output (tmi but liquids are normally absorbed in the colon so output is always a bit liquidy depending on what you eat but the best you can hope for is oatmeal consistency. Dehydration and electrolyte imbalance are always an issue as we lose up to 1.5 litres of water that way on a normal day but if something speeds up the small intestine or you eat the wrong thing you can lose a lot more). Your poor son. I hope he is doing well. I can't imagine the GI issues he has.

KK they give you radioactive eggs and toast with strawberry jam and at 0, 1, 2 and 4 hours you stand (some places you lie down) in a scanner and they track how much of the radioactive material has emptied from your stomach. It takes maybe a minute at most for them to capture the image on the computer so basically you sit in the waiting room for 4 hours and are only in the scanner for 4 minutes. Walking speeds up gastric emptying so you can't even walk around the hospital to waste time.