Ding dong the bugs are dead!

This past week we got the results back from Ellie's stool test... I'm thinking this requires a little background.

Back in November Ellie was really, really sick in spite of going off dairy, soy, gluten, eggs, citrus and a number of other foods. We were seeing a chiropractor at the time, who was doing cranial sacral therapy and adjustments to help unkink some stuff that got kinked during Ellie's very long labor. Anyway, the chiropractor also recommended doing a stool test because, she said, kiddos with issues with that many foods are likely not allergic to all of them, but have some underlying gut dysbiosis. Back then I had no idea what gut dysbiosis even was. So we did the test and the results came back showing two bad things: Ellie had major overgrowth of some bad bacteria, including something called klebsiela pneumonia, which was at a pathogenic level of 4 out of 5. The second thing was that Ellie had zero growth of lactobacillus, which is a beneficial bacteria. We put Ellie on antibiotics to kill the bad stuff, and her symptoms greatly improved while she was on it, but as soon as it was done she was sick again. And that's when we discovered the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which we started Jan. 8.

OK! So fast forward to this summer, when Ellie is still not doing well in spite of having been on the diet for months.

What our blood can tell us

Day 61

Recently we started seeing a nutrition counselor and one of the things she wanted us to do right away is get some blood tests done. Thankfully I was able to get them all done through our insurance and as the results trickled in, I forwarded them to our counselor. The results didn't say much to me, and didn't warrant an alarmed phone call or email from Ellie's doctor or mine, so I assumed there wasn't much news to be found. But late last week I sat down with our counselor and went over the results and what she shared with me was fascinating. I thought I'd share.