I know I need to write this up, but I’m not excited about
it. It’s over now, thank goodness. But it was a big part of my life at the time
so I will do my best to explain it.
Back in June I had a week where I was getting a lot of
stomach pains. These pains are familiar,
they are like the more intense pains I get from a food sensitivity, but kind of
duller and longer lasting. It was
happening almost every time I ate.
Usually in the afternoons. This
was during swimming lessons and I was pretty miserable. Also during Kylee’s soccer tournament that
required a lot of walking carrying chairs and bags and baby. My solution was just to not eat, haha! Until I got there and then I drank my
smoothie and sure enough, stomach ache.
Not too bad though. The smoothie
usually went down okay. Anyway, that one
lasted about a week, I didn’t know what was causing it or how I made it go
away. But it affected my energy levels
and my exercise schedule. It was not
fun.
Fast forward to September.
Those same familiar pains came back.
Along with it, I had seasonal allergies.
I get them every Fall. They are
bad. My gut had told me that fruit was
bothering me (okay, my gut, and the indisputable evidence from being sick so
many times after fruit) so I stopped eating all fruit. Brainstorming with my mom and Googling
things, I got this idea of histamines. I
thought, but it’s stomach pain. Doesn’t
sound like histamine. But my mom
disagreed. Google verified she was
right. (She usually is). This little turn in that direction led to me
do some more searching. I thought,
certainly this has something to do with my seasonal allergies being extreme
right now. But I knew it was food related
too. So I did a search along the lines
of “food or fruit allergies and seasonal allergies” and I came across a chart
showing foods that have similar make-ups as air allergens. I found which allergens are high in Fall in
my area (weeds, ragweed specifically) and found a list saying “if you are
allergic to weeds, you may also be sensitive to bananas, melons, etc” Guess what I had been eating a LOT of
recently. Yeah.
Then I started thinking about how I used to hate cantaloupe,
honeydew, and cucumbers. I liked
watermelon okay but not that much. That
was when I was little. As an adult I
have grown to love watermelon. And only
in the last few months had I decided to try and find a way I can enjoy
cucumbers. I’m not a fan. But I know they are healthy and convenient
and add variety to my veggies. So I
tried them with vinegar and I liked them.
I still wasn’t eating them all the time, but I was tolerating them okay
and eating them occasionally. Once I got
used to the cucumber taste, melons were easier to eat. I had cantaloupe at the Spudman triathlon I
did because they were serving a bunch of fruit at the finish line. The cantaloupe was ripe and yummy. I had also liked the golden honeydew I get
from Sam’s Club. So I decided to try
some more melons. And I did like
them! So I was eating them.
After reading about these allergies I started thinking maybe
the reason I didn’t like them before was because I’m actually allergic! Maybe, maybe not.
So, once I had this information, I started studying
low-histamine foods and what I needed to do.
Let me tell you, it’s a pain.
Anything growing/fermenting/rotting has histamines. Basically any food that needs to be
refrigerated. Some more than others. Spinach and strawberries were high. Meats that are not fresh, have histamines
even if cooked thoroughly. The bacteria
growing actually produce the histamines.
And you can kill the bacteria by cooking it so it won’t give you food
poisoning, but the histamines remain.
Imagine going to a restaurant and trying to figure out if the chicken or
fish is fresh. Or explaining to the
waiter that you need food to be fresh that day or you can’t eat it. Yeah, you sound like a snob that’s making
crap up and they are going to tell you it’s fresh when it’s probably not. Anyway, I avoided restaurants. I couldn’t eat lunch meat at all. Or fruit.
Or yogurt or anything else fermented.
And this went on. For a month. Then another.
I would get sick about half the time I ate. I could eat packaged snack food and usually
be okay, but then I felt icky for other reasons.
When I was in pain, it helped to curl up on my bed. Usually lying down was not so bad. I wanted to be curled up, not straight like
walking. It usually wasn’t so intense
that I had to go home from places like church or sports games. But it eventually wore out my body so much
that I had zero energy and couldn’t work out at all. I slept more.
It was not fun.
I saw my Dr B, my gut doctor. I had gotten my results back from 23andme,
which showed my genetic information.
Then had to submit it to another place to run it for celiac / MTHFR /
etc. And I went over it with her. I have markers for all those things, but only
some of them, not all of them. She sent
me for some other blood tests too. I was
willing to try anything. I also did foot
detox baths! Which were cool and I liked
them. The lady I had do it ended up
letting me borrow her machine because she was leaving the country for a couple
weeks.
In October I was at the kids’ soccer games and a tiny gnat
landed on my cheekbone by my eye/nose. I
swiped it away with my finger, and saw it crushed on there. I tiny little gnat. The next morning I woke up to my face swollen
where the gnat had been. I thought maybe
I had scratched myself and irritated it when I wiped it away. But it looks like it must’ve bit me before I
got it. The first day it wasn’t very noticeable. The second day my whole eye was swollen! What the heck? (Scary, huh?)
My histamines were so out of control that the
littlest thing makes me go crazy. My
face was swollen for four days. I did
foot bath detoxes, hoping to get rid of inflammation. I only did three or four of them and one day
I was doing it and in the middle of it I got horrible stomach upset different
and more extreme than normal. I don’t
know what on earth I did, or if it had anything to do with the detox (I did not
do more than one or two a week, so it’s not like I was overdoing it.) But I didn’t do anymore detoxes after that.
Shortly after the gnat bite, I noticed my foot itching at
church. Like a lot. I realized I must have some sort of bit
there. By the next day I had an elephant
ankle/foot. (I took a shot of my normal foot for comparison)
I thought, if I were to get
stung by a bee in this hyper-reactive state, I would probably die. (Funny because there was a bee in our Relief
Society room while I was teaching around this time! I couldn’t keep my eye on it, or just leave
since I was teaching. Scary. I think that happened before the swollen bug
bites thought.) I did nearly have a
heart attack at one of Kylee’s soccer games when a bee mistook my colorful
leggings for a flower. We were walking
back to the car so I was carrying my purse, a blanket, and a chair. It tried to land on my leg and I pushed at it
with the blanket in my arms, but then just dropped the blanket and my purse and
stepped away. This was in the middle of
all these reactions! I carefully picked
up the blanket and shook it. No
bee. As I was about to pick up my purse
Kylee yells “it’s in your purse Mom!”
(She’s as scared of them as I am.
I mean, she’s more scared because I’m a reasonable adult…) Sure enough, it was crawling around on my
wallet. Well, what do you do? I turned my purse upside down and dumped the
whole thing out on the grass right there.
Then watched as the bee flew away.
Ugh. Not embarrassing at all!
LOL. At least it gave me a chance to
clean out some of the garbage from my purse.
At the end of October I was still suffering from food half
the time (you’d think I would be starving but I would generally starve during
the day and binge at night, when I was less likely to react, and even if I did
react, I could just go lie in bed. It
worked. No weight lost.) Ryan had asked if he could take me to Hawaii
in February and I was SO excited but also I couldn’t stop worrying that I would
still be suffering and that traveling with this problem is not very fun. One night I was texting my sister-in-law
Brooke an update because she was asking.
And at the end of it, she said something like “I’m sure you’ve had a
priesthood blessing already.” And I
thought, well not recently actually. And
I thought yes, I feel like I’ve done as much research and work to fix this as I
could and a priesthood blessing may be just the thing I needed. I asked Ryan and he gave me a nice blessing
and then he went to bed. I started
snacking (because that’s what I do at 11pm when I can’t eat during the
day.) The things I ate were all snacky
foods, things I had eaten plenty of times before and never reacted. But I also saw my pills sitting on the
counter. I had been trying to be good
taking my supplements because they are supposed to help me. I had started this multivitamin that has
methyl folate in it to help with MTHFR (sorry, I’m not going into details on
that. It’s even more boring than the
rest of this.) And Vit C and a natural
allergy relief supplement I had picked up at Natural Grocers because I didn’t
want to take medication on a daily basis.
Anyway, I saw my pills sitting there and remembered I hadn’t taken them
earlier (because I like to take them with food and I hadn’t eaten much
earlier). So I got a handful of pills
and popped them. Then I watched TV for a
little bit. And my stomach started
hurting! Bad! It was an intense reaction and I just KNEW it
was the pills. I had a hard time
sleeping I was in so much pain.
The next morning I pushed the pills aside and decided I was
certainly not taking any of them again until I figured out which one was the
problem and until my stomach pains were figured out. Guess what?
My stomach didn’t hurt the rest of that week! Or the next!
And in my gut I just knew it was the multivitamin. Something in it made me more susceptible to
histamine. I ran that theory by my Dr
and she didn’t know what it could possibly be, but she believed me. The pills I took that night happened to be
the last pills in that bottle and I had a new bottle ready to open the next
day. Since I hadn’t opened it, I can
return it. Yay! Amazing how things work out. The priesthood is amazing. I know it was clarity I received from that
blessing that helped me figure out it was those pills the whole time.
In time I got my strength back and was able to start running
again. Not a fun experience. And I’m just so happy it’s over and I hope it
never happens again. I can not remember
when I first got those pills. It seems like
I may have got them back in June and just wasn’t that great at taking
them. So maybe they caused the problems
in June too. I don’t know for sure. All I know is I am done with all the
pills. Ryan has said things to me before
like, “it seems like the more pills you take, the sicker you get.” I would roll my eyes of course. It was all healthy, natural supplements! But I’m over it now. Ryan gets his way (less money wasted on
supplements). I still take a probiotic
every day. And I sometimes still take digestive
enzymes. And I am now taking workout
supplement drinks… so I guess I’m not completely done. But so far I feel great!
(Finally typed up in March of 2017)
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