The GI (gastro-intestinal) tract is the tube which connects your mouth to your anus. Except for the area in the back of your throat and also the pathway to your lungs, it's a closed tube system (except at the level of absorption). This means nothing that goes in the tube gets out, unless it's broken down into its nutrients that can be absorbed into the blood by the intestinal walls. Except with damaged intestines, either from a deterioration due to Crohn's, or being poked by something like a chicken bone--in this case stuff in our GI tract can leak out.
A laparotomy, in my understanding, cuts into the abdominal cavity to inspect the area inside the body but outside of the GI tract (excuse my clinical description--I know it's graphic when we attach the procedure to our young loved ones). I don't understand how inflammation there can cause GI symptoms since the GI tract looked fine. And as far as I understand, if anything in the abdominal cavity were affecting the GI tract, it should have been caught by the scopes he already had.
I have a lot to learn about everything, but it sounds to me like your son's inflammation is more like in his lungs, sinuses, or from the mouth ulcers, and the inflammation there is causing the high CRP results and presumably high sed rates. And if he has a lot of blood in his system that will cause the diarrhea and IBD symptoms. However, like I said, I have a lot to learn about everything.
To answer your questions about Isaac, we strongly suspected UC when the chronic diarrhea turned into blood and mucous. And it was bright red blood so we suspected his colon to be inflamed instead of higher up in his guts. And he didn't seem to have an apparent absorption problem (we was healthy and robust instead of malnourished). His sed rates were high which told us there was an inflammation. His infectious tests all came back negative, which ruled out parasites, c diff, and so on. In fact, I wanted to forego the colonoscopy and just assume he had UC and treat accordingly, but our doctor wanted to see for sure and get biopsies (It could have actually been any number of special types of colitis). Then he got a look and gave the diagnosis. In our case, the endoscopy from the top showed he was fine down to his colon. From the bottom up showed that his whole colon was affected and inflamed. Then the diagnosis was official and he got going on UC meds.
Check out our blog for more details!
Troy
Father of Isaac, dx UC in 10/2011 at 29 months old
Read details here:
http://ibdinourhome.blogspot.com
