Possible ibd?

Hello all,
I'm hoping someone can help us piece together my 4yr old cats symptoms and get this figured out once and for all.

Jax is a 4yr old male kity, 19lbs, yes he is overweight but he is also bigger in stature as well. His vet always tells him he's tall.

Ever since he was a kitten he's had diarrhea and vomiting. Some foods have done well for him but only for a certain period of time. Eventually the symptoms always come back. The best foods have been purina's beyond grain free and hills ideal balance hairball. He gets one-third cup of dry food twice a day (no free feeding). Occasionally he will get one-half of the small can of wet food which I add probiotics to it.

The vomiting has been progressively getting worse. Initially I was giving him 1mg per pound of zantac to help during an episode. Once I seen improvement I would stop the zantac.

However as of 2 weeks ago, Jax had another episode. (Hasn't had one serious since January) the once a day zantac was not helping. Tried giving laxatone and he vomited that up as well. I had to increase to zantac twice daily. I missed one dose and the next morning he vomited a jelly like substance with blood. All of it was blood... no food.
This was Saturday, he is still currently in the vet ER. His xray showed thickening of his intestines which suggested IBD to the doctor. Low protein levels but not extremely low so she wasn't concerned there.
His glucose levels were high, 289 when admitted buy dropped to 93 the next day. The vet is attributing that to high stress and not considering diabetes at this point.
She did an ultrasound on him, no food after midnight and the ultrasound was at 2pm today. She found food was still in his stomach.she added metoclopramide to his medications to get the gastric processes moving. She said other than that, his ultrasound looked good. Which now has me confused. His xray shows inflammation but now his ultrasound is decent.
She also mentioned possibly testing his thyroid. He does ask for food alot. To be honest, I argue with him about it. He meows after I just fed him and I tell him no. It goes on for a while lol.

The vet thinks that a hairball could have caused the thickening of his intestines but I'm not buying it. How does a hairball cause him to throw up a good amount of blood.

His last episode in January, his regular vet took a stool sample and found microscopic blood. He was started on Flagyl then.

Should I start a prescription ibd diet? Does this sound like something else?

Just bumping this up for you.  I don't really have any personal experience with IBD, but know others do.  I know it can be tricky though.  There are many, many thread here about IBD if you do a search from the top of the page.  I'm almost thinking though, at this point, you may just need to follow your Vet's advise and see what happens.

OR, if you don't trust your Vet, ask your friends if they can refer you to one that they trust and possibly switch to that one.  Have you thought about looking for an Feline only Vet?  That's always a possibility.

I personally am doubtful that a hairball is causing this because of the history and the episodic nature of it.  My kitty started with IBD flares when he was very young as well he had his first flare when he was only 18 months old.  He would have symptoms that were like foreign body ingestion.  Anorexia and vomiting stomach fluids and dry heaves.  I remember when I took him to the vets for his first flare the stool that was on the thermometer had blood in it.  Given his age the thought was that he had swallowed something.  Lots of X-rays with unchanging gas patterns, kind of like his whole digestive system was frozen.  He would come out of it and everything would go back to normal again.

This went on for 6 years, several vets later along with a couple of hospitalizations I got the IBD diagnosis.  Patches is on a steroid.  To be honest I never did figure out a trigger for his flares.  I too tried different foods, although I never tried what many  consider the magic bullet a raw diet.  He would go anywhere from a few weeks to a few months between flares.