Hey there. You sound like my daughter O. She has been in an awful flare for 5 years now and she is a bleeder. When healing the rectum is the last bit to heal and wouldn't you know it is the biggest bleeder also. So unfair!
7 weeks is really too early to be tapered completely off Stelara, especially if you have majority colonic disease. It is not as good at handling colonic disease and does take a really long time for onset of action.
Curious, have you previously failed another biologic? If you are biologic naive, you have a better shot at success with Stelara.
Let's see what worked for my daughter....she was on prednisone a lot but when they absolutely had to try to get away from steroids because she was developing diabetes they tried tacrolimus as bridge therapy. Tacro didn't work for her and she moved to budesonide (Uceris) but even that didn't work great for her until we added rectal suppositories and later when suppositories weren't covered by insurance proctofoam.
Uceris (Budesonide) isn't as terrible for you as prednisone because it is has a high first pass through the liver so very little is absorbed systemically. But it does need help and I think that is where the foam cones in. My daughter did it twice a day for a few weeks straight and then when bleeding completely stopped for about three days the GI let he go down to once a day and if bleeding stayed away twice every other day, then once every other day until she got down to once a week.
Another thing they had my daughter try was an antibiotic cocktail. Different combos work for different people. The one that has made the most different for my daughter is Flagyl, doxy and amoxycillin. She took it every day for a few months and then when numbers and bleeding improved she backed down to two weeks on two weeks off. She was literally heading for a colectomy before we added the antibiotics and she got her first calpro of 100 on them! Then got a 56! She stopped antibiotics and budesonide (she has been on it for 15 months) for a week (college kid) and she flared right back up but the jury is out on whether it was that or the fact they tried to reduce her Entyvio.
She is also on SCD diet and FWIW, we find diet therapies work much better with small bowel disease (my younger daughter has small bowel disease) than colonic disease but we still use it to try to add to the synergistic effect.
Are you also making sure your vit D levels are good? My daughter's GI has her supplementing with turmeric as well for it's anti inflammatory benefits.