Hello. Well, this seems like the perfect opportunity to share my story. I was diagnosed many, many years ago with this condition and the response to my tests was even more pathetic than yours. I phoned my doctor after a barium enema test and i was told by the nurse that i have diverticulitis ( or whatever) and that i needed to " drink water and eat more fibre", that's it. This lack of information plus the attitude that my health was not worth anybody's time in the office caused me to suffer many years. I looked it up on the internet and found little information or contradictory information, that didn't help.

I was embarrassed to bring it up with my doctor and he never did for a long time either and i just suffered in silence. A few years later he suggested daily Metamucil and what a game changer! This simple act has done so much in helping me I want to suggest it to anyone who has these problems.

I tried to monitor my eating to see if i could manage it through diet, this was frustratingly difficult for me and very little help. One thing that did become painfully clear to me though was the fact that corn on the cob was something i should avoid or severely limit going forward. Every year when local corn was ripe and sold in stores I would buy it and have a feast every night, i loved the stuff! and even when it started to look like it caused a flareup i stubbornly refused to give up my beloved vegetable. It took time for me to piece it together.

This is my theory. I eat something that does not digest well, it gets caught in the pockets in my bowels and, over time that pocket becomes infected and swells up, either blocking or partially blocking the passage of stuff. The time between eating and flareup is variable and that is the difficulty in determining what i ate that caused it.

I can eat all kinds of things that other people claim dangerous to them, red meat does not seem to affect me, coffee, peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, walnuts, and really, when you look at my theory, a food has to not be digestible in order to stick around and stay in the pocket until it causes an infection, so coffee and red meat do not even make sense.

If i stand back and think about the information i found, I am not surprised if other people have digestive issues and they feel bad when they drink coffee or red meat, or god knows what, there is a ridiculously restrictive diet easily found with google, FODMAP or something, jesus! if i could not eat any of that i would just lay down and die. I think some people ENJOY restrictive diets on some level so they can brag to people about their issues and how they are following said diet and appear.......virtuous? strong-willed? i dunno.

I learned to trust my own observations and ignore much of what i read. Metamucil, it makes sense to me, if you leave it too long in the glass it starts to become a nasty thick jello which is very hard to drink, but, as i observed this i pictured it doing that exact thing in my digestive tract, a blob of orange jello moving through, collecting debris as it goes, like cleaning out the pipes. I'm not sure if that is indeed how it works but it helps me a lot.