harka

Hi angeltears,

I'm sorry you still feel so sick. The reason you're feeling that way is not necessarily because the flora of your gut have been disturbed; rather, after having an intestinal toxic bacterium (like salmonella or campylobacter) in your system, there is a lot of damage to the wall of your gut. As a result, you lose a lot of the microscopic enzymes like lactase and sucrase that are normally located in the "brush border" of the bowel surface. Without these enzymes, and in the presence of some of the residual damage from all the previous inflammation, you have what they call a "post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome". This is NOT the same thing as Irritable Bowel Syndrome that many young women get.

In any case, you can be assured the infection is gone, but it may be up to two months before you feel totally normal again. The probiotics may help, but you may want to avoid taking in too much dairy stuff because one of the most severely lost enzymes in the gut is lactase, and by eating a lot of dairy, you'll get lots of gas, cramps and diarrhea.