Gastric / upper stomach issues

[dee_gril]

Hi all


This may be a little bit long so please bear with me and thanks for listening. I have suffered from two bouts of gastritis in the last five years or so and I may be on my third. The reason I am not sure is this has lasted almost three months but the symptoms are quite different from the last two.


The first one was in 2010 and it lasted months and months after high stress and nexium didn't help and endoscopy only showed mild gastritis. It went away on its own eventually after I think I stopped being anxious about what it could be. During this time, I was bloated, could hardly eat and I burped hundreds of times a day.


The second bout I had in 2013 and it lasted a few months as well and endoscopy showed moderate gastritis. This was also after a period of stress. In both cases I was sent away without any treatment and the symptoms resolved themselves. This time I could also hardly eat without refluxing and was bloated and burped and had mild prickling pains very occasionally.



This year I have been stressed for about 5 months, plagued by health anxiety about other things. Around May, I started having a similar pin prick sensation at a spot in my centre stomach and I would burp and it would go away. Soon after, a friend of mine got diagnosed with lymphoma in the stomach (she is younger than me - I am 37) and a little after this news I started having all this pain in my stomach. The pain lasts only seconds and is sharp / cutting / scratchy if it makes sense and would happen once or twice a day but enough to make me stop in my tracks but it wasn't unbearable. Then I started to get burning so I started on Somac for a week (which I believe is a PPI of some sort) that you can get over the counter. This did nothing and made me worse. I had gas pains all up my back so after about a week of this I stopped and decided to see how I would go for a while.


The burning and pains still came back daily and I have a sour (gnawing) feeling in my upper stomach and oesophogus. I went to see my GP finally after a month of this and he sent me for an abdominal ultrasound and a h.pylori breath test. Everything came back normal so he thinks it's acid or maybe inflammation again and prescribed me Famotidine 40 MG (pepcid?). I took that for a while and the scratchy pains went away for a while but I developed this new pain near the bottom of my left rib and just above the belly, it was more dull and sometimes throbbed and would last a few minutes at a time and happened every other day. Eventually I had a period of five days of feeling relatively ok on the Famotidine after being on it for three weeks so I thought I was getting better and I had a some cream puffs (oh so yummy) after dinner for two nights and after that the pain under the ribs was back, I also developed a pain that felt like was had been kicked in the stomach, it felt sore when I bent over to tie my shoelaces and also the scratchy stabby pains as did the burning came back!


So now I have been dealing with this and I am most scared of the stabbing pains, sometimes it feels like my stomach has been twisted for a split second, other times it's like someone took some needles and poked me from the inside all over. I then decided that maybe famotidine wasn't working so now I have brought myself down to 20MG a day. It's been over three weeks on Famotidine.


I suppose after all this my main question is to those of you who may have had stomach issues:



1) Can chronic gastritis manifest with these sharp stabbing /stinging pains ... I have heard that the pain is dull (which I also have) which is why I am so scared. It can't be acute as it has gone on this long. What did your pains with gastritis feel like (especially if it is chronic)


I haven't gone for a third endoscopy yet and I am very scared I have developed something really bad and I have health anxiety so it doesn't help. I was feeling quite positive about this in the first month but by now I am feeling very defeated as this is almost three months and right now I am sitting her with a sour feeling in my stomach near my chest feeling like crying and my anxiety is coming back. Also I read that people with blood Type A have a higher risk of stomach cancer and my blood type is A and it's freaking me out even more!


If you have read this far, thank you so much :(

[nomorepanic]

Hi

This is just a courtesy reply to let you know that your post was moved from its original place to a sub-forum that is more relevant to your issue.

This is nothing personal - it just enables us to keep posts about the same problems in the relevant forums so other members with any experience with the issues can find them more easily.

[somethingfeelswrong]

I've not had chronic gastritis, but I did have an episode last year, for about a month, and one this year too. I've almost always got stomach acid too, sadly. I think the sharp pains could be caused by gastritis - when I was told I had it last year (I didn't do any endoscopies, but it went away with anti-acid medication) I had these horrible pains - like you say, as if someone's poking you with needles from the inside, for an entire day. Could hardly get out of bed for that day.

I don't think you should be scared of going to the doctor and getting an endoscopy. This should help alleviate your fears. And in any case, I can get quite uncomfortable after more days of acid. And what you eat could also affect this, so probably the cream puffs were not great. Expressing your concerns with the GP should also help, if they refer you for an endoscopy or perhaps prescribe some other medication.

Also, I find that anxiety also makes my stomach acid a lot worse, and so when I'm really anxious and panicky there's a lot of burning even when I don't eat anything. This disease really sucks - but if you try to give yourself a break from all the worrying maybe this will help you (I read somewhere about setting a specific worry time, and trying to only worry about things during that time...)