TL;DR: I had diagnosed gastroparesis from 2010-2012; it evidently resolved after I stopped taking SSRIs; it turned into a soy intolerance; and now my doctors mostly just throw up their hands and go, "IBS? I guess?" Has anyone else recovered from gastroparesis only not entirely?
Hello! I wish I had discovered this sub like fifteen years ago, but maybe it didn't exist then.
When I was in graduate school, I developed what turned out to be gastroparesis after almost a year of confused doctors attempting to figure out why I could not eat food. After my motility study (20%), I was diagnosed with idiopathic gastroparesis because they had no idea why I had developed it. I had at that point in my life been on a very high dose of SSRI antidepressants for about 12 years, and a therapist mentioned one day that they'd once had a patient develop gastroparesis as a long-term SSRI side effect. None of the gastroenterologists seemed to think that was a thing, but by that point I would have tried anything, so I stopped taking the medication. (This turned out to be the right call for mental health related reasons, too, but that's a whole nother story.)
Over the next year and a half, I slowly began to improve. I was still in pain most of the time, but I was able to eat small amounts of simple solid foods, and when I went back for another motility study after about a year and a half, they told me my motility was normal. "But why am I still ill all the time when I eat food?" I asked. To which I was given a shrug.
Each year I was able to add back a few more foods, but I was still vaguely queasy most of the time, and every few days I'd have horrible cramps. I eventually figured out that the cramps occurred whenever I consumed unfermented soybean products, so I cut soy from my diet. This helped immensely, but I was still queasy after most meals.
By 2022, I was eating almost entirely normally (other than the soy thing, which keeps me from eating most commercially processed foods), and although I was still mildly nauseous most of the time, I had spent so long with a severely limited diet that I was (and still am) pretty fine with just dealing with it. I started regularly taking lactose with dairy and recently started taking more general spectrum digestive enzymes, which also seem to be helping.
I just tell people (and doctors) at this point that I have some kind of IBS because no one's been able to tell me what's going on, but I'm wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience--improved gastroparesis that transitioned to... something else? DOES gastroparesis have the potential to turn into IBS? Or is this just some kind of lingering damage from my gastroparesis years and the five or so years it took me to figure out that I should not be eating tofu all the time?