Hypothesize This

As an analyst type, this whole wonky gut problem has vexed me like you can't imagine for the past two years.  It's been in the back of my mind for the past, oh, 40+ years, but since the appendectomy it's been in the forefront of my mind.

Okay, so I've always had a wonky gut.  But why on earth would it get far wonkier after having an appendectomy?  This useless, vestigial organ gets removed, and suddenly nothing works right anymore; that just doesn't make sense.  So I've come up with more than a few hypotheses, a few of which I'll share here.

I should also mention a short -- very short -- test that I gave myself a month or so after the operation.  Most people have heard of some sort of "elimination diet," where you get rid of most of the things that you eat and then add things back in slowly.  Since I often ate oatmeal for breakfast, I decided to "start from scratch" eating only oatmeal.  I was planning on eating only oatmeal, three meals a day, for a week, then start adding things back in.  But an interesting thing happened: after a day and a half, my symptoms got worse; after two days, it was clear that eating a lot of oatmeal was a Very Bad Idea.  So I stopped (I think that was the point at which I stopped eating breakfast altogether, but I'm not sure).  The important thing that I took away from that failed experiment, even if I didn't recognize it immediately, was that a diet high in a single complex carbohydrate was exactly what I didn't need.

So what's going on?  Perhaps:

• The human appendix does actually have a purpose.  In 2007, Dr. William Parker, PhD., of the Duke University Medical Center, conducted a study and came just short of concluding that the human appendix may actually be a sort of "bug warehouse" for the good bacteria that's supposed to populate the colon.  After a catastrophic event, like a bad bout of diarrhea, the appendix kicks in and repopulates the lower intestine with the good bacteria that's supposed to be there.  So, maybe, despite a compromised small intestine, my large intestine was able to compensate, and whenever things got really bad my appendix would help out by recolonizing the colon.
• The slicing and dicing involved in the operation severed nerves that my body was relying on to tell my large intestine when to work harder.  One thing I learned after all this started was that the human gut is incredibly complex, and has a highly advanced nervous system of its own.  Whenever you're cut into, nerves are severed; small ones, large ones, whatever is in the path of the knife is going to be severed.  Even a small incision on the surface of the skin can cause some numbness, and that's due to one or more nerves being cut.  So maybe one or more nerves got cut, and my body stopped understanding when it was supposed to get rid of excess fluid in the colon; I think I've always been sub-par in that area to begin with, so maybe this just made it exponentially worse.
• My body went into shock, and "normal" operations were disrupted.  One thing the surgeon mentioned was that there was a lot of adhesion in the area, which is usually caused by inflammation.  He'd done a bazillion appendectomies, and he said the average time it takes is about an hour and quarter, and mine took two hours because of all the adhesions he had to break up to get to wherever he needed to get to.  Well, maybe my body had gotten used to everything being stuck together, and got really, really pissed off at having everything separated, so much so that the normal neural pathways no longer performed their appointed tasks.  The problem I see with this hypothesis is that two years seems an awfully long time for my body to continue operating sub-optimally without figuring out how to re-hook up some neural pathways to get things working correctly.  But what the hell do I know, I'm not a neurologist.
• I'd had a SIBO situation all along, but it got exponentially worse during the operation.  The appendix is right next to the ileocecal valve, which keeps large intestine contents from working their way back into the small intestine.  When you go in for an emergency appendectomy, you don't have the luxury of the time it takes to get rid of all of the contents of your gastrointestinal tract (and I do mean ALL), like you do when you're going in for a colonoscopy.  I'm sure that there are procedures in place that limit any cross-contamination, but I wasn't watching the procedure; what if things got actively backed up into an area they weren't supposed to be in? Maybe that told a colony in my small intestine, "Hey, reinforcements coming!"
• Certain planets aligned on July 8, 2011, and I just happened to be in their crosshairs.

I honestly have no idea what happened.  Clearly, neither does my gastroenterologist, and while I'm sure he'd be happy to be able to help, I don't believe he has near as much interest in resolving the issue as I do.  At this point, my best guess is that:

1. I've had a dysbiosis (microbial imbalance) situation going on in my gut for as long as I can remember due to overuse of antibiotics;
2. That situation damaged and continued to damage the microvilli in my small intestine, making it impossible to digest complex carbohydrates completely;
3. My large intestine made up for that imbalance as best it could, helped out by my appendix, either because it repopulated depleted good bacteria populations or simply gave my large intestine more surface area to work with;
4. The appendectomy removed the help that was needed, and my colon simply can't do the job alone.

Based on that guess, getting rid of complex carbohydrates completely seems to be in order, hence my upcoming SCD trial.

I went shopping today, and I can tell you that it felt weird, really weird, to be buying chicken and ground beef.  Weird in a bad way.  But I feel like I have to give this a try.