Lately

Lately, my head is spinning with creativity.
 Lately, I've been swooning over quilting patterns and fabrics. Lately,  I've been driving my Mama and my hubby crazy with all my fabric and quilting chatter. Lately, I've been dreaming of a more creative career, but I really have no idea how to create THAT for myself.

Lately, I've been working on reshaping my body and my thoughts.
Lately, I have been trying to part with Dr. Pepper, or at least severely limit our interactions with one another.
Lately, I've been sore from working out,  but so satisfied with the soreness. Lately, I've been reading and reading and enjoying both novels and non-fiction. 

Lately, I've been paying more attention to how much things cost and flirting with the idea of trying to incorporate coupons more successfully. 
Lately, I have been sleeping with both my ceiling fan and heated mattress pad on low.  
Lately, I've been happy at home.   

Managing Life With Bumps In The Night

So, the bumps had returned. So I did the best thing I knew to do: I went online in search for answers! Well, sort of.  In all honesty, I went online to get a phone number for an allergist in my Hometown and did what any reasonable adult would do: called my mom and asked her to set up the appointment for me, even though I had looked the number up.  I got scared so I had her do it. Pathetic, I know.  But, in all fairness, the allergist's office has been my dad's family's doctor for over 50 years! So my mom, dad, and brother are all well acquainted with the office and I knew she would have more sway about getting me in on the exact and only days I would be available for several months. 

And sure enough, she came through! They scheduled me, somewhat unwillingly, for allergy tests over the exact two days that I was planning to be in Hometown.  They told my mom that there was a good chance the tests would be inconclusive, but I persevered and thought it would be worth going.  So I stopped my medicine for a few days, became quite irritable and bumpy and itchy, and then went and got a lot of scratches and a whole bunch of food injections.   The tests showed that I have food sensitivities to, oh, pretty much everything that any normal person would like to eat.  

Seriously.  I'm sensitive to wheat, coconut, garlic, blackberry, cauliflower, strawberry, pear, pea, kidney bean, grape, red and green pepper, chile powder, brewers yeast, oat, rice, banana, pecan, spinach, apple, celery, coffee, watermelon, cow milk, beef, lobster, shrimp, tuna, halibut, apricot and peach.  

If you made it through that list you will probably be thinking two different thoughts, simultaneously. Those are 1. Man, that is a lot of food; and 2. There must still be tons of other foods that you are not sensitive to and therefore, what is with all the whining?

I know, because I had these same thoughts for about a month before I got a handle on myself. For a while, I tried to eat other foods they tested that I had no reaction to. Things like chicken, corn, pinto bean, cherry, etc.  And I think I was doing okay, but the bumps kept coming and I kept cheating on things like coffee because it can be really discouraging to limit your diet. 

But eventually, I realized I needed to see a nutritionist to figure out how to truly eliminate the foods I knew I was sensitive to and how to still eat a relatively healthy diet.  The dietician taught me a number of things I never knew, introduced me to foods I hadn't heard of, and advised me of other foods that weren't tested but were in a like family to those I were so I could stay away from them too. 

I think it has been almost two months since I saw her, and since that time, I have been doing better at staying with my safe foods and not cheating by eating unsafe foods.  I did have one more pretty bad attack and have had some other slip-ups, but overall I'm doing okay with "safe" foods, many prescription drugs, and now, some digestive enzymes.

I'm not sure how long it will take to get over this bout of illness or if it will be something I live with for many years.  Right now, this combination of things seems to be working, and I'm trying many different types of cooking and recipes that I likely would have before these issues. 

We were trying to generally eat healthy for a while before the bumps started, but in all honesty, I wasn't deterred enough from things like cheese to really eliminate them.  But now that I have essentially been forced to rethink food and diet, I don't even miss most of those things we have eliminated.  It may be partly because it makes me feel better as far as hives go, but I think I generally feel better in life, too.  So I'll keep eating "safe foods" until something changes, and that makes things like preparing my own Thanksgiving a lot less worry free, since I knew exactly what was in everything I was eating. 

Things That Go Bump In the Night

So I have sort of alluded to some dietary changes that I have had to make and how I had to be careful in order to make Thanksgiving "safe" for me to eat this year.  I suppose it is time I share in more detail my struggle.
Around May of this year I started noticing little bumps around my elbows. I thought that I was getting spider bites, because it is common for people in the area of the town we were living to have trouble with spiders and the bumps were small.  But then the bumps kept appearing, and constantly in new areas. We travelled to our Hometown on Memorial Day weekend and I saw my general practitioner for a yearly checkup.  I showed him the bumps and explained that they "come and go. They move around and change colors and it seems like they don't last long, but there were often new ones springing up." He advised that I should see a dermatologist to diagnose the skin condition, but with some clever internet sleuthing I self-diagnosed with hives in a matter of hours, instead of waiting seven months for an appointment with a dermatologist.
And I started self-medicating with a little bit of anti-itch creams and low dosage antihistamines.  This worked well and good for a while, except for my occasional bouts of irritability prior to bigger breakouts and sometimes pretty severe itching.  But then one night in the middle of June, I woke up and went into the bathroom feeling awfully strange. I turned on the light and standing at the counter I thought that I looked strange.  I went and got my glasses from my bedroom and returned to the mirror. My lip was swollen so much that I hardly recognized myself.
So I woke my husband up and asked him to take a picture and email it to me from his phone.  He did and I forwarded it to my general practitioner (who regularly emails and texts patients at 3 in the morning--he is awesome by the way). I was quite alarmed at my appearance so, of course, I did as any normal hypochondriac female in the twenty-first century would do: I googled it.  After reading a few things, I debated with myself for a few minutes about whether I should wake my husband up to tell him I was going to go to the Emergency Room, at the direction of the interwebs, and decided I probably should.
He wanted to come with me, being the modern day night in shining Tundra that he is, so off we went.  He was prepared for an eight hour wait, but we were triaged almost immediately, because they were concerned about keeping my airway open.  I was given a quick round of corticosteriods, antihistamines and H2 blockers to stop the allergic reaction I was having.  The doctors quizzed me about the time period I had been having bumps, my diet, my soaps, etc., and finally told me that I have angioedema (or swelling in the face) and I probably have idiopathic urticaria (or as we common folk say, hives from an unknown cause).  They told me I could keep track of everything I came into contact with and try to determine the cause, but they said I might not ever know and that the swelling would likely not return and that the hives would eventually go away.
My general practitioner set me up with prescriptions for an EPIPEN, antihistamines, and an H2 blocker for the histamine response from my stomach.  This combination of drugs made the bumps totally manageable for the rest of June, all of July, and most of August.  A few would appear during the night, but I regularly cleared up during the day. So I slacked off about keeping track of everything I came into contact with, and just tried to eliminate common allergens from my diet, from my washing liquids (of all forms) and through other sources.  I was perfectly happy with this mode of operation, because the hives were pretty well controlled and because I had heard that hives often last for several months at a time.   But time continued on and unfortunately for me, the medicines and my lifestyle changes did not stop the bumps from reoccurring in the night.

A Little Miss Fit Update: February 6th

So yesterday I celebrated the Super Bowl by going to the gym.

I had the weight area of the gym almost to myself (thank you football!)

I did about 30 minutes of strength training, doing sets of reps on six different machines.

Today I'll probably need to do some cardio to loosen up what I'm sure will be sore muscles.

I'm here and I'm still writing,

A Little Miss Fit Update

To keep myself honest and accountable, encouraged and recorded, I might occasionally post work-out summaries on the ole blog.
February 1, 2011:
20 minutes of elliptical
20 ish minutes of learning how to use the weight machines at the gym from Handsome.  (thanks).   Its wasn't much but it was a good start to the month on a cold winter day.