We had two Conference Calls 5 hours/each this weekend!

This Sunday, we had 52 callers participating in our conference call, which started at 2:00p.m. Not everyone stayed from beginning to end, as callers joined in and left throughout the call, while some talked and others just listened.

We talked about many things such as the organization plans of having our next Meet-up at Miami Beach this coming Spring 2009, as well as the progress of our anthology. As usual, we also exchanged information on the odor management protocols that have helped some sufferers.

We discussed the pros and cons of the various options we have regarding which site to move our MSN forum as a result of the announcement that The MSN Groups service will close in February 2009. This will probably be an ongoing discussion for the next four months, and in the end, our Manager, Arun will make the final determination.

One of the callers told her story of her recent experience with having a colonic irrigation, as opposed to using the lactulose recommended by the National Institute of Health in the TMAU Management protocol. See the posts in this blog entitled, Colonic irrigation : A demonstration video and An odor-reducing management protocol discussed in the Thames Festival meet-up.

The benefits of doing a Colonic irrigation as opposed to taking a laxative is that with a colonics, one doesn’t experience the normal increased of odor lasting a couple of days produced with the first lactulose treatment to cleanse the gut. Since the lactulose cleansing is a slower process, it tends to increase the odor for a day or two; whereas the Colonic irrigation cleanses the colon very well in only about 45 minutes without producing this undesirable increase in odor. In addition, follow-up lactulose cleansings should not produce the significant increase in odor, since the gut had previously been cleansed, as long as a good diet regimen is maintained.

An impromptu conference call was also held the previous day, on Saturday at 3:30p.m., with only a 15 minute notice, and Ben, Cabel, Sharon, Arun, and Jess were able to attend. Ben was able to join for the first time, and he stayed on the call for three hours, even though he says he doesn’t usually like talking too much on the phone. The call was still going at 8:30p.m. As Arun posted later in MSN, “It's always a pleasure chatting to my family. I long ago discarded the notion that the term family has to have a biological link (brother, sister, mother, father). You guys are all my family. Well actually, I believe it will eventually come out that we DO in fact have a biological link (we share a defective metabolic pathway). But more than this, we understand each other's lives and feel compassion for each other. I am so proud to be a part of this group!”