The Twinkies

I love this song. I went to college with the musician and she was the person who let me know that dark chocolate has no milk. This information about dark chocolate became very useful recently when F and I were on that elimination diet. We’re off it now. She’s all better. Anyway, when I spent a summer in Toronto studying Latin with a remarkably gorgeous TA, living through a heat wave with no air conditioning and eating too many mango salads I had it set on my laptop as my alarm so I woke up to it every day.

Just a random thing. You can buy the album, by the way. It’s good.

It’s funny how resistant people are to the idea I’m using naturopathy to diagnose and treat F’s issues. More than one person has shared that muscle resistance testing is obviously just the placebo effect, which is, I think, their nice way of saying “laden with quackery.”

I would note that F obviously has food sensitivities. Feed her tomatoes, watch her digestive system churn out poop that rashes on contact. Something is not right there. Stripping common allergens from a diet, waiting until her digestive system is back to normal based on poop output and then reintroducing them one at a time seems to me an awfully conservative way of treating the issue. It nicely falls into the “first, do no harm” mandate of medicine. Skin prick tests are not good at picking up milder sensitivities that can make you feel lousy without actually causing a full blown allergic reaction and elimination and challenge diets are a standard method of diagnosis.

And, yes, milk, eggs, yeast, strawberries and corn are all very common allergens.

I first met naturopathy when I couldn’t take steroid nasal sprays for my spring allergies because they are not wholly safe when breast-feeding. A friend suggested I try a teaspoon of local honey a day. Local honey contains the local pollens mildly processed via bee gut. It sounded a trifle nuts but I figured, “Can’t hurt, might help” and that taking a teaspoon of honey each day was hardly a burden. It helped. Steroids or honey. Which would you pick?

Muscle resistance testing has good results for some people. And, being forced to eat fresh, non-processed foods, homemade sourdough bread¹ and gourmet chocolate² is, like eating honey, hardly the worst prescription ever. If her digestive issues don’t clear up then we move to blood testing. What we are doing now? Can’t hurt. Might help. I’ve noticed that people who turn first to naturopathy seem to have clear skin, healthy hair and a noticeable dearth of illness. Perhaps its the reliance on healthy eating. And, of course, if the placebo effect works who cares that it’s “not real”? I had horrible headaches almost every day during the spring until I took allergy medication. Honey also keeps me headache free. I don’t care whether it is because I only think it will; all I care about it the lack of the horrible crushing pain in my head.

So I’m doing the naturopathy dance and I don’t particularly care if anyone thinks it quackery. I have no interest in convincing anyone that muscle resistance testing is a useful test and no desire to convert anyone to alternative methods of health care. All I want to do is get my daughter well.

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¹ Because sourdough is made from a starter that utilizes wild yeast instead of baker’s yeast many people with baker’s yeast allergies can eat it without any problems. The only catch is you have to make it yourself because commercial sourdough tends to “cheat” and use some baker’s yeast to speed up the rising process.

² High quality dark chocolate has neither milk nor eggs in it.

Right now I have a husband in rehab on major medication and I have to spend 3 hours every day in the car in order to see him. Meanwhile I have made major life sacrifices to be a stay at home parent and now I hardly ever see my children. Both of my children have minor fevers. My daughter was just diagnosed with food allergies that include corn, yeast, milk and eggs. I have to relearn how to shop and eat and cook. I’m hungry all the time because I am constantly on the run from one obligation to the next and to eat this way you have to prepare meals. There are no convenience foods that don’t contain corn products. Last night I changed a green, tarry diaper at 3AM. I tried to switch from cow dairy to goat dairy and the results were quite ugly. Green. Tarry. Smelly. I nursed both kids repeatedly and brought them to the bed to cuddle in their feverish misery then returned them to their cribs so they could sleep all at 3AM. Well, 4AM too. I ended up breaking down on the floor of their room. I’m just at the wall.

Today we painted in the backyard and I have a giant toddler painting to take to Brian. Then there was lots of playing with the hose and the water sprayer. Paint leads very naturally to playing with water.

Fiona can put on her own sweater. She loves to do this. She does this over and over again. I am going to have to hide her sweaters all summer or she will be wearing 4 layers in 80 degree weather because it is just so much fun to put on your own sweater.

I was thinking a sorbet/sprinkler play date party might be in order for June. Homemade sorbet treats for the lot of us who can’t have dairy and sprinkler fun for the toddlers.

I have pictures of the kids to process to print for Brian I need to trim the edges of the giant painting. I need to sleep. I need to go to Yoga. I need a break. I need a good cry. I need some time to not be either taking care of other people or doing baseline maintenance on myself. It could be so much worse, everything is going really well with Brian and we live only a few blocks from a Whole Foods and I like to cook but I’m just really overwhelmed right now.

F has been a real over-achiever in the diaper rash area. I don’t want to brag here but my kid can manifest a diaper rash simply on contact. Some kids need to sit in their own waste for a while but mine gets right on it and rashes herself right up. Throw in her propensity for yeast rashes and you’ve got a child with a future in rash generation.

I knew that tomatoes were a culprit; feed her anything with tomatoes and she spends the next week miserably rashy. I decided not to play around with food issue guessing games and just had her tested for food sensitivities. She tested positive for corn, strawberries, tomatoes, mangoes, cow dairy, baker’s yeast and eggs. We have stripped those out from her diet and, because I am still nursing, from my diet as well. The working theory is that the antibiotics she was on for the first 2 days of her life knocked out the beneficial bacteria in her gut as well as the bad guys and she has never managed to reestablish a healthy gut. She’s on fish oil to try to help her do that. We go back in a month to retest her and see whether I can reintroduce any items into our diets.

Can I tell you how much I want a rich, fresh-from-the-oven loaf of egg bread dripping in butter right now with an ice cold glass of milk to go with it?

I feel like such a follower. Everyone has food sensitives these days; it’s the trendy problem of the year. But, really, a future in rash generation? Does that even pay more than minimum wage?