(Blog 3) Smooth like butter on a bald monkey

Still healthy!!

2005-04-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to post a quick note to say I am still healthy - this is no fluke. I am feeling confident that I have determined all the root causes for my recent issues. Knowing this feels great!!! I have so much energy now; I have energy all day long. I can't say enough how great I've been feeling. I've basically cured myself through diet (with a few drugs to assist, such as to scare away the parasites). Previous to learning what was going on, all the drugs I took were treating the symptoms - now I am treating the cause through diet. And I've learned so much about how so many diseases start this way, and are treatable through diet.

I've decided to start a newsletter which describes the things I've learned about health, common illnesses that doctors don't diagnoses, disease prevention, healthy eating, chemical illnesses, etc.

Healthy!

2005-04-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

My health has been consistently good. Only one medium migraine in the last two weeks (started because of acute exposure to wood smoke). I've had no colds, congestion, tiredness etc. I've been feeling awesome, and have had energy from 7 am to 10 pm with no swings in energy or mood. I think I've finally figured out all the different factors that were causing my ill health. Now that I'm gluten free, (in addition to all the other modifications to my lifestyle), I'm doing great. Yay!!!!

Lately I've been reading about the work of Weston Price (for a synopsis, see http://www.mercola.com/2001/jan/28/weston_price.htm). AMAZING. I just finished reading Ronald Schmid's book "Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine". I can't recommend this book highly enough. His analysis of our current diet and the poor quality of foods now compared to the past was eye-opening. Based on his reading, I've been inspired to find a source of raw milk (http://www.realmilk.com/what.html) from pasture-fed cattle (among other improvements to our diet). I'm meeting with the farmer tomorrow to buy a share of a cow.

more on this another time...the most important thing I wanted to share is the fact that my health is finally stable and I'm feeling great.

restaurant = migraine?

2005-04-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

I've found wheat in more products around my house. For one thing, the multi-B vitamins and my C vitamins had wheat. Also, I read that alcohol often has gluten, because it's fermented from grains.
This weekend went well, for the most part. I felt pretty good friday night, saturday and most of sunday. I'm still a little congested, but getting less so. I started using garlic ear-drops on friday, and this seemed to have the best effect: my ears got less congested and the popping stopped (after my ears got better, my nose started to clear up too). I stopped taking the pseudafed on saturday, and am still getting better. I am very happy about this.
Sunday my husband and I went out to run a few errands - it was the first time I've run errands with him this year. We ate lunch at a mexican restaurant I used to eat at frequenty. I asked the waiter if several of the dishes had tomato or wheat, and found one that I thought would be safe: shrimp in a butter garlic sauce, with onions, green peppers and refried beans. The only thing that was iffy was the beans or possibly any seasoning that was added. Unfortunately, half an hour after eating I started getting congested, and an hour later I had the beginning of a migraine. I don't know what what wrong with the meal, but I'm definitely better off making my own food. As soon as we got home, I took vitamin C and quercetin, but it was too late to have much effect. I took a migraine med later when the pain got really bad. I woke up iat 5 am with my heart pounding and my head hurting, so I just got up and took some adaptogens (to convert some of the excess cortisol from the reaction to something benign like dhea), vitamin c, more quercetin, and another migraine med. What a way to start a monday.
I'm getting a little worried about not being able to eat food that I don't prepare. It just doesn't seem practical. How am I going to travel? I really hope that, once my body starts healing, I will be able to tolerate more foods. I was reading about gluten intolerance, and found it generally takes 3-6 months for the small intesting lining to heal after you stop eating foods with gluten, so, even though I've been trying to heal for months now, because I was inadvertantly eating gluten in some foods (like my vitamins and soy sauce), I've still got a while to go before I'll see significant improvements.

This is a very complicated puzzle

2005-04-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

My sinus infection started up again last monday. I've been sleeping 10 hours a night and taking it easy, hoping my body can get rid of it this time. It was just getting worse and worse until I started taking pseudafed on wednesday. That kept it at bay. It's still there though - my ears are popping a lot and I feel tired. I know you aren't supposed to take decongestants for very long, but when I went of the decongestant friday my head filled up really quickly and I couldn't think straight. This is awful. At least I'm not on an antibiotic.
One good thing I've been noticing lately. I probably could get out of the house a bit more now...my sensitivity to some smells does seem to be decreasing. I went down to my parent's tree farm last weekend and was mostly ok. But since i got the sinus infection on monday, i've been too tired to go anywhere else. The good news is that I am holding even, mostly, as long as I take the pseudafed.
Last week I also found a really great interview on the web. It turns out the person interviewed is the pharmacist I use with Dr. Buscher, and he (the pharmacist, Mark Clark) talks about the anti-parasite drug I took (if you are interested, it was an amazing interview and covered a lot of relevant topics: http://holisticnurse.com/ic/audio/MarkClark.html). He covered a lot of relevant topics for me. He went over how even mild gluten intolerance really wrecks the lining of the gut and increases it's permeability. He said even gluten in supplements is enough to cause multi-day problems. So I scoured the ingredients list on my supplements, and sure enough, 2 of them had "vegetable fillers", which apparently is often flour. So I just stopped taking those supplements. I'm wondering if that is why I always have acne when I take the supplements. Otherwise, I am very careful to be gluten free. Could be yet ANOTHER piece of the puzzle. It really seems like you have to identify ALL of the factors and remove them ALL before any real healing happens. In my case, its a pretty long list: candida, food sensitivities, allergies, gluten-intolerance, parasites, chemical sensitivities, mild exercise, balancing the hormones, ... I wonder what else? Have I finally figured out enough that my body will start to heal?

Amaranth popcorn

2005-03-26T17:39:00.000-08:00

Since developing all the food allergies, I've had to get creative and expand my diet to incorporate new foods. Every once in a while I get a craving for a food I can no longer eat. Last night a friend brought over coconut sorbet, which was really good, but had corn syrup in it (which I can tolerate in small amounts). So I decided to make my own, using coconut cream, vanilla and a little stevia. It was SUPER creamy and delicious. This was definitely the best icecream substitute I've had since giving up icecream. Then this morning I was missing popcorn, and I'd heard you can make popcorn from amaranth. Now, amaranth is a leetle teensy tiny seed about the size of pin head (maybe a little bigger). But I poured some in a pan, turned on the gas... and made the cutest popcorn I've ever seen. It was delicious and tasted surprisingly like... popcorn (though I admit I haven't tasted any in over 2 years, but it matched my memory for taste and smell).

Healthwise, I've been doing ok for the last few days, and so far (knock on my big wooden desk), I have gotten halfway through the weekend without a migraine or other sign of illness. Plus (guys cover your eyes), my period started again with no pms symptoms before hand.
My health is improving, bit by bit...

another little cold or something

2005-03-23T20:14:00.000-08:00

I was feeling great for the last few days - really chipper. But last night I woke up at 1:30am and couldn't sleep...my throat was sore. I got back to bed by 3, but I am starting to feel sick today - sore itchy throat and swollen lymph nodes. Sigh.

Something is fishy about weekends

2005-03-21T20:37:00.000-08:00

Saturday I was miserable from a migraine, which started late friday night and woke me up in the middle of the night with pain. I walked on the treadmill for a while to see if exercize would make it better, but no joy. I was a lump on the couch for the rest of the day. At times it was just a dull ache, but it just kept going, and was growin worse Saturday night. By Sunday morning I gave up on the no-drug approach and took a fromig. It worked. I had a fabulous Sunday. The anti-amoeba drug I'm on can cause headaches, as can the chlorella tablets (a form of algae) I'm taking. (The chlorella cause headache because they speed up detoxification. If I'm taking too many for my liver to handle I'll get a headache. So this is a possible culprit. Starting today I've halved my daily dosage, to be safe). By Sunday evening the migraine was re-appearing, so I took another fromig. End of migraine. No sign of it this morning.

I have no new theories at present about MCS or my current health problems. I did read in one of my books that Candida can cause MCS-like symptoms. My tests showed I'm Candida free at the moment though, so no joy there (though the tests tend to be quite inaccurate). Still, I have been around friends lately and haven't noticed many bad smells :) (laundry detergent, fragrances in hair products etc), so I think I'm becoming less sensitive.

A lot of friends have asked me what I use to clean. I use various combinations of vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda and boiling water. The following article gives some recipes: http://housekeeping.about.com/cs/environment/a/alternateclean.htm. For mold & disinfecting, I use diluted grapeseed extract (look up GSE on the web). The great thing is that most of these ingredients are cheap, and none of them make me tired when I use them (a first for me!). For lemon juice, I use the cheap kind that you buy in a green bottle. It has some preservatives in it, but they are non-volatile and it works fine for cleaning and is a bit cheaper than using fresh lemons - which are too yummy to use on for cleaning house anyway.
For the record, we've also been exclusively using baking soda to clean our clothes. The clothes always smell and feel fresh. The only thing I've noticed is that our whites aren't quite as white now that we aren't using bleach with every white load. I can live with this. If it becomes an issue, I can have my husband run a load with bleach while I'm out of the house. I can live with this too.

On a great note, I'm off the antibiotics and still feeling sinus-infection free. This is awesome. Today my energy was good....I feel rested, clear-headed, motivated... apparently my body just doesn't like weekends... If you have a theory, I'd be interested in hearing it.