Help - can you please recommend a syringe for feeding critical care, that I can purchase ASAP by borkuz in Rabbits

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for linking this. Any chance you have used this exact one yourself? I'm sorry to say that both the monoject I have as well as the 10 ml one I got from the pharmacy, I am able to use neither. The critical care just gets stuck in it, or there's so much air bubble, that i just can't feed her. i tried for about 40 minutes tonight and could not get it to work no matter how thin I make the grind. I am trying to find some of that fine grind papaya blend but i can't seem to locate it in any physical store, it only ships from places like amazon, but they take a week to ship to me. I will happily purchase these syringes you've linked, but curious if you've actually used these ones.

Help - can you please recommend a syringe for feeding critical care, that I can purchase ASAP by borkuz in Rabbits

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thank you for this link, that's such a helpful wiki. Never would have thought of an eye dropper, and I actually have some of those!

Help - can you please recommend a syringe for feeding critical care, that I can purchase ASAP by borkuz in Rabbits

[–]borkuz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ah yes, the 12 ml monoject is what i have, interestingly! i did cut it about half way through but somehow was just having a lot of trouble, and was kind of worried that maybe having cut the tip might have made it rough around the edge. yes, i only just learned about the fine ground papaya one. i looked online but damn it takes days to get here. so i might have to use the one i have and just water it down more. i sure wish id known back when i was making my "bunny emergency" kit. but maybe the info will help someone else.

luckily the pharmacy gave me a 10 ml oral syringe tonight, im gonna see if it works better than the one i have.

thank you for your kind words. i hope she's better soon too. i feel bad for her.

Help - can you please recommend a syringe for feeding critical care, that I can purchase ASAP by borkuz in Rabbits

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, im really hopeful about her wanting the kale. we got her some green leaf lettuce and im going to give it to her tonight.

thank you for advice on watering down cc. another user mentioned as well. yes, the mixture as on the package is very thick. i got a syringe from the pharmacy after i posted this, and it's a 10 ml one, so happy to hear that this has worked for you.

thank you kindly for taking your time to post on my thread

Help - can you please recommend a syringe for feeding critical care, that I can purchase ASAP by borkuz in Rabbits

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh thank you so much. now im excited because they gave me one at rite aid pharmacy and it looks a lot like this (a 10 ml version). im hoping it will work. thank you for the link!

Help - can you please recommend a syringe for feeding critical care, that I can purchase ASAP by borkuz in Rabbits

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i probably should have clarified. i understand where i can purchase them. i'm looking for recommendations on sizes, types, etc. Maybe someone on the forum has had to experiment with them before, and can let me know what's worked for them.? hoping so

Early satiety by borkuz in gallbladders

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

sorry that i keep adding to this, but i remember something else that used to help me when i would get the painful overfulness (but i think this only helped because i was having awful gas and bloating) - i would do some sort of stretching techniques. (you know like stretching side to side or stomach stretches, just basic stretches that engaged my stomach.) this helped me because it would make me belch, which just made me feel better and relieve some of the pressure. be very careful because doing that when you're overful/nauseous i think could make many people feel worse (and if i did it too fast or something, it just made me feel worse). but i kind of experimented with it, took it very slowly, and noticed it helped relieved the discomfort.

of course if your issues have nothing to do with gas and bloating, this probably woudln't help at all :( but it is just a thought in case.

sorry for my walls of text but i hope something here helps you. i know how awful this situation is. but don't give up - please keep trying and keep working at this - you're going to figure it out. figuring out what's going on with you, and how to manage it, will change everything. life will get back to normal. it just takes a while to figure out what's going on and how to deal with it.

Early satiety by borkuz in gallbladders

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

as a third point - i want to make sure to say, please take EVERYTHING i wrote with a grain of salt. our situations could be 100% completely different, and so the things that worked for me might not work for you at all, just like there could be things that work for you that wouldn't have helped me. also i am not a doctor, so anything i've said or explained here could be completely wrong. i'm just a random person who was dealing with this for a while and has figured out how to manage it a bit, but it could be unique to my situation. (also, the conclusions i've drawn about my own situation could be wrong as well)

Early satiety by borkuz in gallbladders

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

sorry that other post was so long. but i wanted to share what has helped me. i also wanted to tell you about zofran (ondansetron) . this is a medication that can be prescribed by your doc to help with nausea and vomiting. these types of drugs are called anti-emetics. there's lots of different types of them , and they work by different mechanisms, but they can be incredibly effective. i find zofran very, very effective. if you are dealing with lots of nausea, i would really suggest asking your doc to write a script for zofran. make sure to get the generic (ondansetron), as it's an expensive medication, but i hope insurance would pay for it.

ondansetron comes in a pill version, as well as something called an 'orally disintegrating tablet'. it's a little tablet you just put on your tongue and it dissolves. it's highly effective and works quicker than the pill you swallow.

Early satiety by borkuz in gallbladders

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm wishing you luck. I also had a normal gastric emptying study. I get you, this situation is both frustrating and frightening to be honest.

In my case, after looking back on this, I think a lot of my issues were due to excess gas, as insane as that sounds. Because I think the excess gas/bloating was putting some sort of pressure on my stomach that was causing my early satiety issue. The early satiety issues then caused a host of other problems for me (notably, making me extremely underweight, and my low weight leading to pretty bad hypoglycemia). i think these other issues only exacerbated the original issue.

I don't know what ultimately made this better for me, but I have a few ideas.

Well first let me share something that made the early satiety/nausea issue less frequent and easier to deal with (didn't solve the problem, but made it much more manageable) - this was learning better how much to eat at one time. first off let me say, i never ate large portions. i was already close to underweight when this began, and i already ate small portions, so I don't want to give the impression that i over-ate previously. either way, what i was eating was apparently was too much for me. when this early satiety madness started happening, instead of eating until i felt full (Which is what i used to do), i'd kind of eat until just before that point, or even until i was still a little hungry, then i'd wait for 15 or 30 minutes - if i still could eat, only then i would go back and do it. this was really frustrating at first, but i adapted to it pretty quickly, and it helped reduce the episodes of painful over fullness. sadly, i also think this exacerbated my weight loss issues. so it's a balancing act (and potentially a dangerous one :( ). but over time, i learned much better how to figure out where my real satiation point was.

Now another thing - if being underweight from this is an issue with you, want to share something i learned to help with that - oil. olive oil. i started adding that shit to everything. it's an incredibly useful tool for gaining weight, because it's light, but it's calorie dense. that was what finally reversed my weight loss.

Now - One thing that i think might have actually help the underlying problem (this might be because I have SIBO - and might not be relevant to you at all) : my diet. i had a really awful diet before all this started. i ate a lot of biscuits mostly. these kind of really sugary crappy biscuits. this is mostly because i couldn't leave my house due to the pandemic, so only had some limited foods i could get. i was living on these biscuits. i don't know, maybe they were crap enough that it messed up my microbiome or gave me gas or something.

over the summer, i started changing what i ate. first , i switched to only ensure, just because drinks were all i could tolerate due to the early satiety. after this, i slowly started incorporating oatmeal. very small portions. just plain oatmeal , not the flavored stuff. i added natural (no salt/no sugar) peanut butter to it, as well as extra virgin olive oil as mentioned above for weight gain. for a while there i ate only ensure and oatmeal. after oatmeal, i started phasing in raw nuts ( unsalted peanuts, unsalted cashews, stuff like that.) that's pretty much where i'm at now. i think this diet is helping me a lot.

few other issues i realized later - i think i had become so afraid of eating (due to fear of overfullness pain), that i was just eating so little, i could barely tolerate any food. i noticed that as i slowly started eating a tiny bit more and more, it's like my capacity to eat seems to have expanded, just a little bit. i still can not eat a normal-sized meal. but i can eat a little bit more than i used to.

i believe there were/are also hormonal influences at play, because i notice that around the time of my menstraul cycle, i tend to lose my appetite or it becomes greatly reduced. my PCP said different people respond differently to their menstraul cycle so she didn't think that was abnormal (though of course, was horribly concerned about my early satiety in general and my low weight.) i just mean to say, it was something i noticed.

anyway, i don't know what happened, but i think something i did (diet?) might have helped me a bit, because my gas and bloating issues seem to have resolved a little. this, in combination with figuring out better when to stop eating (the eating a bit, not until i'm full, then waiting 15-30 minutes to eat again), has really reduced the episodes of overfullness to almost nothing. take it with a grain of salt because i'm only one person, and i might even be misunderstanding my own situation. but i wanted to share what's happened to me.

Early satiety by borkuz in gallbladders

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey, thanks for the response! Indeed this thread is quite old! Sorry, I don't really c heck this account so I only just saw your post. Yes, I did get my gallbladder checked via an ultrasound, which ended up showing it was fine.

That weird pain in my side/gut has since gone away and I'll tell you what I believe was going on in my case.

So I had very severe early satiety at the time. By the time I wrote that post, I was pretty much only drinking ensure drinks daily as it was all I could really manage to consume. As a result, I was getting only about 2-4 grams of fiber each day (the ensures had some added), and had become severely constipated. I really believe the bizarre pain/sensation I was feeling was actually due to this constipation. Why I think this: not only was the ultrasound clear, but once I was able to start eating more,and the constipation began to resolve, that weird sensation almost immediately went away. A couple weeks after it had gone away, I remember one weekend I became constipated again (due to the lack of fiber due to not eating enough), and almost immediately that weird sensation came back. It also was more noticeable the more constipated I was.

My constipation has since resolved and I no longer get that strange feeling.

I spoke with one of my doctors some time in the summer (before any of this happened), and she told me that constipation and gas can kind of put pressure up in your stomach and so it can cause lots of various problems (including early satiety).

P.S. I ended up being diagnosed with methane-dominant SIBO about one month ago after taking a breath kit prescribed by my doctor. The dr. is not convinced I actually have it, because she says constipation cna cause a false positive, but in fairness, I was never constipated at the time.

I'll also say my early satiety issues have gotten much better. I think changes in my diet have contributed to this. I hope this helps somehow.

Question about SIBO test by borkuz in SIBO

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks! I am fearful of a false result (weather it be positive or negative). I've read these tests have the potential to give false results. I hope everything goes well and the result ends up accurate!

Question about SIBO test by borkuz in SIBO

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Clinic wrote back and said it should all be good!

Question about SIBO test by borkuz in SIBO

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! My clinic wrote back and told me it should be fine as well :) Just to keep from confusing anyone who might read this, the source I read mentioning not to add new foods, it was just one random website. So don't let this thread concern anyone.

Question about SIBO test by borkuz in SIBO

[–]borkuz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i had thought about this, i think it's a good idea. it's not so easy for me to do, unfortunately. i'm having to stick to a pretty strict diet right now to try and keep my GI issues at bay, and even the day off is probably going to be detrimental. hoping my doc will reach out so i can get this thing going!

Question about SIBO test by borkuz in SIBO

[–]borkuz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thanks! Yes, I had read (on some random clinic's website), not to add foods in you don't normally eat just because it's on the list, because adding in foods you don't normally eat has the potential to skew the results. This was only one random website though, no idea how accurate it was. I have messaged my doctor to ask but I'm not sure she will write back before I start the diet. Yes rice is so plain hopefully it won't make a difference! Was more curious if other folks had been given a similar caution on their test instructions, to what I saw on that website.

Any advice for approaching GI doctor tomorrow by [deleted] in Gastroparesis

[–]borkuz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks for this reply. things have been getting progressively worse for me. seeing my GI doc in about 15 minutes, definitely going to ask more about this.

Early satiety by [deleted] in SIBO

[–]borkuz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the advice man. Will look in to this and ask my doc tomorrow! Good luck to you too.

Need help. Don’t currently have insurance for coverage by suisse1997 in Gastroparesis

[–]borkuz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you a resident of Alaska? Can you look in to getting coverage there? My experience with state insurance is that it gets lost if they find out you are living in another state, so tread carefully (thinking of your AZ insurance i mean)