- You’d never guess how much of your life revolves around your guts.
If you’ve read even a couple of Oddee stories, you know we like to crack a wise-ass joke. Sometimes, though, we come across a story so mind-boggling that we just hit a blank.
This is one of those.
Meet Daniell Koepke. Since her college years, she has struggled with debilitating irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) that makes her life a complete misery.
Over the years, she’s consulted multiple doctors and experts. Despite their best efforts, none of the treatments Koepke tried worked.
Desperate situations call for desperate measures — so Koepke decided to try fecal transplants. That is, inserting donated poop into her guts to alter her microbiome.
For the record, that is an actual medical treatment that can relieve certain conditions. Yet, considering Koepke’s poop donor was her brother, it’s a little weird.
Miraculously enough, putting her brother’s poop in her system did help with Koepke’s IBS. However, she started suffering from acne problems — just like her brother.
So, she switched to transplanting poop from her boyfriend. Again, her IBS was better but now she caught the boyfriend’s issues with depression.
Just can’t catch a break.
Increasing IBS
When Koepke was in college, s*** hit the fan. Literally.
Seemingly out of nowhere, she developed IBS — and it was bad. Koepke herself believes her condition stems from a diet high in refined sugars and low in fiber, although no one hasn’t really been able to figure it out.
Whatever the cause, however, her IBS got steadily worse. That wasn’t for lack of seeking medical attention, though.
For five years, Koepke visited doctor after doctor. However, her symptoms didn’t neatly fit any specific type of IBS, so every doctor was left scratching their heads about what to do.
Usually, they fell back on describing Koepke antibiotics. She’s been going through six different courses of antibiotics a year, which has further ravaged her gut by killing off all the beneficial bacteria living in there.
As a result, Koepke has been left to cope by cutting out foods that make her stomach and intestines go haywire. Unfortunately, that means she can only eat about 10 things that she’s deemed tolerable.
Of course, which such a limited diet, Koepke has begun to suffer from various nutritional deficiencies.
Experimental Treatment
If that doesn’t sound like life worth living to you, you’d be correct. Desperate to eat something else and live without constant discomfort, Koepke started looking into alternate treatments.
That’s when she found out about fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs).
FMT is an experimental medical treatment where gut microbes from a donor are introduced into the patient’s stomach intestines. Usually, that’s done by turning the donor’s feces into an enema or swallowable pills.
It sounds like a bad joke, but it’s a real treatment — and it can work. You see, your poop chute supports an entire ecosystem’s worth of bacteria. If that ecosystem gets out of whack, it can cause serious issues.
“The microbial community inside our gut can have surprising influences on different parts of our body,” Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist at UC San Diego, told Business Insider.
However, as we mentioned, FMTs are experimental. There’s no comprehensive data available for when and where they should be used, so doctors can be hesitant to use them.
Koepke, however, was willing to try. And if she couldn’t get help from medical professionals, well… She’d just have to do the whole thing herself.
More Than Poop
Koepke talked her brother into donating his poops for the experiment, and she turned them into fecal transplant pills. Don’t ask us how — we don’t know, we don’t want to know, and even if we did, we wouldn’t tell you how to do it.
After creating the pills, Koepke swallowed them. And against all common sense, her condition got better.
For the first time in three years, Koepke went to the bathroom normally. She also started gaining weight again, since everything she ate wasn’t getting immediately flushed out.
However, there was a side effect. Koepke began suffering from the same hormonal acne that her brother has.
Obviously, the issue is somehow linked to the brother’s gut microbiome. As her newfound acne got worse, Koepke decided to get a new poop donor — her boyfriend.
Can’t say we’ve ever had that discussion with our significant others.
Koepke’s boo thang was willing to donate his poop, and it worked just as well as her brother’s. Yet, she again got something else with the poop.
Her boyfriend has been struggling with depression in the past. After she started taking his poop, Koepke noticed that she, too, was getting increasingly depressed.
“Over time, I realized my depression was worse than it’s ever been in my life,” said Koepke.
According to researchers, it’s possible that lacking certain gut bacteria can contribute to depression. Her boyfriend’s poop transplants had clearly wiped out whatever the anti-depression microbes are in Koepke’s gut.
In the end, she decided she’d rather deal with pimples than the crushing void of depression, and Koepke switched back to her brother’s poop. Within a week, her depression disappeared.
It’s baffling how much of our lives depends on our guts.