Can history of diverticulitis be the reason behind abdominal pain?
Patient: HI, I ve been having issues with abdominal pain for the past 3 1/2 days. I have a history of diverticulitis and when this kicked in on Friday afternoon and got a lot worse by Friday evening, I went to the ER to be proactive. They did bw and a CT scan. All was normal but the ER dr did say he felt it was caused by constipation due the amount of stool in my upper section of my large colon and they sent home and told me to take some magnesium citrate. It was 3Am by the time I got home so I took the recommended pain meds (800mg of ibu and 1000mg of tylenolPM) and went to sleep. When I woke up the pain was gone. We had a party so we went to that. After we got home at 4:30 I took the mag cit. It didn t kick in and so at 8PM I took a dose of miralax and within 30 mins, I had very loose stool. I thought that was the end of it. Then this morning I felt mild pain and it built until at by 1Pm it was pretty painful again. I ve had nothing but loose stool for the past 3 days so I don t think it is constipation. I have no fever, no nausea and no vomiting but the pain can get pretty severe, up to a 6 or 7, not debilitating but enough that I cannot concentrate and just want it to go away. Oh, I also just had a colonscopy due to the diverticulitis (had a flare-up in early June) and all came back normal, with the exception of the mild diverticulosis. Doctor: Kindly mention your age and sex also.As per the history one important thing has been missed. Stool examination especially for occult blood. How many diverticulae are there? there might be many and sometime numerous.However, even if there is only single of them it is always prone to recurrent inflammation causing pain, bloody diarrhoea etc...Kindly have a stool examination and physical check-up to rule out other possibilities like amoebiasis, drug reaction or appendicitis.regards,