Appetite/stomach Issues (new To Forum)

[cmart0]

My name is Charmin and I am 28 and I live in Alaska. I passed out in the shower a year and a few months ago and have been struggling with POTS ever since. I have lot of trouble concentrating, so I have to keep this short and I can't read complicated stuff for very long so I won't be able to look through old posts easily. I am having a lot of trouble eating. I not only don't feel hungry very often, eating often makes me ill. Most of the time the smell of food turns my stomach unless it is something very mild, like a brothy soup. I am pretty much living on ramen and cheez-its. I can't take multivitamins because they violently upset my stomach, so I know I am not getting things I need. Has anyone else encountered this? What have you done to counteract these problems?

In your responses please avoid as much medical jargon as possible, as I have trouble even processing regular English. Thanks!

[Guest tearose]

Hi Charmin, welcome.

Okay, trouble eating has been one of my issues.

Here are some things you can try...

Try tiny bits of food once every hour...two spoons of applesauce or two spoons of rice, a one inch square of protein....

Get a children's chewable vitamin and cut it in pieces, try taking these pieces over the day with one of your crackers.

Get some kind of meal replacement liquid, these seem to go down easier and stay down.

If you have gallbladder issues or stomach issues, see specialists and treat the problem making you experience this nausea.

hope you find what helps!

best regards, tearose

[Poohbear]

I too have these issues.

Haven't found anything that works for me though.

Meds haven't helped but still waiting to try Domperidone

I am only able to sip 1 cup of chicken broth (takes about 3 hours to get 1 cup down); I can eat a couple spoonfuls of pudding, slow small bites of saltines, toast, rice, mashed potato and italian ice.

I am able to drink liquid supplements but I can never get much down at any one time.

Have you had any testing done?

[momdi]

HI Charmin,

So sorry to hear of your eating problems. Being able to eat is something we all take for granted and any difficulty eating is so frustrating..

My son just got home from the hospital for dehydration and low potassium following a bout of gastroenteritis. Two weeks later, he's slowly graduating back to *real food*.

At the hospital, they checked all his enzymes as well as an endoscopy and his gall bladder to be sure all that was ok. Just be aware that a gall bladder ultrasound is not sufficient to diagnose problems - you need something called a HIDA scan to be thorough.

Some posts here helped us to understand that low potassium, even the low side of normal, contributes to nausea, so you might want to have that checked also. Especially since you're not eating very much, that seems possible. Gatorade and Traderade (at Trader Joe's) and Emergen-C packets are all good liquid sources of potassium.

After talking with a nutritionst, we realized that his problem was multi-faceted - difficulty swallowing, feeling full, nausea. The nutritionists seem to parse these things out a bit better than the docs. Our meeting with the nutritionist helped to understand the swallowing part of the problem. To the docs, it was all *nausea*, and they didn't understand why there was still any problem since he was getting the zofran.

He's on zofran for the nausea and mestinon for the swallowing and fullness. Significant improvement from both.

He's had good luck with gingerale, cans of soup (Soup at Hand by Campbells are easy) - especially creamy tomato, crackers, rice pudding, mashed potatoes, and cheese quiche. The nutritionist was able to give a list of ways to increase the nutritional density of foods - nothing magic, but some good ideas that you don't automatically think of.

In my recent posts about Mike's illness, we got a lot of helpful info here. Seems that these eating issues are pretty common with POTS. However, I haven't seen them much discussed in any of the literature, except in very general terms, such as eat frequent small meals.

Best of luck to you in this frustrating struggle.