For as long as she can remember, Minnie Hatch has experienced tons of infections, including those of the urinary tract, sinuses, skin, and ears. Doctors frequently treated her with antibiotics. When she was about 19, she began having distressing gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, including diarrhea and vomiting.
“I had abdominal cramping, but it was also complicated by prolonged uterine bleeding, so it went under the radar,” Hatch, 31, of Ogden, Utah, told CIDRAP News. “We got the bleeding to stop, and the other symptoms didn’t stop.”
Her obstetrician-gynecologist recommended Hatch visit a gastroenterologist, who was “super confused” at first.
“He’s like, ‘Something is definitely wrong, but I don’t understand [what],” she recalled.
Finally, he asked Hatch what she experienced before her GI distress began.
“I was telling him about how I was always sick, always on antibiotics,” Hatch said. “He was like, ‘Oh I couldn’t see the forest through the trees because you’re so young. I think you have C diff [Clostridioides difficile].’”
C difficile is a bacterium that causes severe gastrointestinal symptoms such as frequent watery diarrhea and intestinal inflammation, also called colitis. There’s a perception that older patients in hospitals are more likely to contract a C diff infection. But while they do remain the highest-risk group, the infection is occurring more often in younger patients living in the community.
“To credit the medical system, the C diff rate in hospitals has markedly decreased,” Bruce Hirsch, MD, a member of the board of directors at the Peggy Lillis Foundation, a C diff education and advocacy group, said. “We have seen C diff continue to evolve, and we see C diff migrate into the community.”
‘I was able to advocate for myself’
In 2015, when the gastroenterologist first diagnosed Hatch with C diff, she took the oral antibiotic vancomycin, which seemed to work at first.
“I was OK for a few months,” she said, but “I eventually ended up having multiple recurrences.”
To stop the recurrences, she opted for a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), which at the time was in its early days, leading Hatch to call it “almost archaic.” In an FMT, a doctor transplants healthy bacteria from a donor’s stool to a patient who has a C diff infection.
Courtesy Minnie Hatch
For Hatch’s procedure, she needed to find a donor, and, luckily, her brother-in-law was able to help. Finally, she experienced some relief. “I did not have recurrences after that,” she said.
Soon after, she became pregnant and had a traumatic birth experience, in part, because the medical staff worried that they could contract C diff from her—even though Hatch was not symptomatic at the time.
As she grappled with the fallout from the birth, she discovered the Peggy Lillis Foundation and gained a “sense of community and engagement that I hadn’t found before.” Finally, she understood what she had been experiencing.
“I previously had only been able to find like one Mayo Clinic article on C diff, and it was maybe two paragraphs long,” she said. “It said, basically, ‘don’t take antibiotics.’”
