now what?

Okay, so now I think I have irritable bowel syndrome. God. I feel like I’m turning into one of those people who can only talk about her ailments, but I have not felt this bad in years. I went through this period about five or six years ago when I would have these bouts or, as I thought of them, “attacks” during which I would be seriously constipated for days, weeks, accompanied by intense stomach pain. My belly would distend, and I literally could not eat anything that would not cause pain and bloating. Even chicken broth would bring this on.
Then, mysteriously, it would go away. Then come back. I couldn’t seem to find a pattern. I went to various doctors and practitioners, one of whom was a proctologist. I told him my symptoms. He said, “Eat more fiber.” At the time, I was literally eating nothing but fiber, three times amount he recommended. I tried to explain this, and he gave me a pamphlet with drawings of fruits vegetables and grains illustrating what he meant by “fiber.” I said I thought I might have irritable bowel syndrome. He laughed. He said if I did, I would not be constipated, I would have diarrhea. About a year later, I saw a commercial on TV for a new drug, just for women that treated IBS with constipation. I’m actually grateful the doctor did not prescribe it, or I’d probably have gone the drug route, and if possible, I would rather not.
The naprapath I was seeing at the time suggested that my symptoms were allergy-related. Not food allergies, but seasonal. That was also during the fall, so she may have been on to something there. She also recommended that I eat a chopped-up apple sprinkled with flax seeds before going to bed at night, and to avoid raw vegetables.
These things seemed to help.
Since then, I’ve had a few bouts of this now and then, but nothing as severe as that, until now. I checked a few websites (I know, I know) to get more info about “triggering foods.” I’m not eating any fried or greasy foods or white flour, which are major culprits. But I have been eating a lot more nut butter than I usually do, and carob, both of which can cause an attack of IBS. Crap. So there are two more things to eliminate from my already fairly restricted diet.
I don’t even know if I have it or not, but in any case, I am very grateful that for my birthday, my husband gave me a gift certificate for a colonic. (Yes, this was a request, not a random stab and what I might possibly want as a gift this year ). I am going to redeem it at 7:00 tonight. I am in a lot of pain at the moment, and I am counting the minutes.

another day of graditude

I teach a writing class on Tuesday nights, and my mom usually babysits. My folks are vacationing in Mexico this week, so I called the kid across the alley to see if he could sit. He has done so before, with mixed results. Nothing “bad” has ever happened when the kids are in his care, but he’s done things like forget to turn off the overhead light when putting the baby to bed, and last time, he wouldn’t let my older son put the CD’s in the boom box because he didn’t believe we would allow this. He is very earnest and took a Red Cross Babysitting course and brought his certificate to show us when he came for his “interview” (a meeting which he insisted on having). But, he has just turned 13, and since a three-year-old and one-year-old are a lot for ME to handle, we generally use his services when we’re going out after the kids are in bed.
Tonight he didn’t show up. My class starts at 6:30, and he was to arrive at 5:30, which would give me just enough time to drive across town, park, check in at the office and get to my class. At 6:40 I phoned my brother’s house since they live close to the campus where I’m teaching to see if they would be home, but they were going out. I am GRATEFUL that the sitter they had hired for the evening to watch my niece happens to be the same woman who babysits in the nursery of the church we attend, so my kids know her. So, when I pulled up in the dark alley behind their building and handed my kids off saying, “the baby’s got teeth coming in and he’s been really fussy all day and neither one of them has napped and I hope no one poops because I forgot the diaper bag tim will be here by 7:30 to pick them up my class starts in three minutes gotta run bye,” I was very GRATEFUL it was someone they knew and I didn’t have to speed out of there leaving them in the dust with a complete stranger.

back on the wagon?

So I guess I need to figure out what I am doing, whether it’s taking things one day at a time, re-committing to this diet, blowing it off and eating what I want, or, having cut my sugar cravings, moving forward with my new lifestyle, which includes eating small amounts of sugar once in a great while.
The last one here is my favorite, but it’s the “once in a while” bit that throws me. Does “once in a while” mean special occasions? And if so, how are those defined? Does it mean once a week? Birthday parties? Tuedays?
With the holidays approaching, I feel like I need to at least have some kind of game plan in place, and then if I choose to deviate from that fine, but right now things feel sort of like a free-for-all.
Sometimes, I have felt as if I could go on following the diet as I have been for a long time. I’ve gotten somewhat used to it, the sugar cravings have subsided a great deal, and I’m getting back into the habit of cooking, which is a huge part of it. And sometimes I really did think, maybe I just won’t eat sugar at all anymore. But then it was my birthday and I found that I wanted to eat a piece of the molten chocolate cake my sister-in-law made. And have a glass of wine. And I felt okay about doing that at the time.
So then I thought, well, I can go along like this, as long as I can make exceptions now and then. But the holidays are coming up, and let’s face it, there’s a “special occasion” every other day. So then what? Decide in the moment? That doesn’t feel safe to me. Do what I can until after the first of the year and then get serious again? Decide that I’m just not going to eat any sugar, period?
Would I feel too desolate, like I’m denying myself too much?
I try not to live in a black-and-white manner, but maybe I need to.
I recently read a post on this subject that I found very enlightening. Reading Mama Dharma’s thoughts on sugar consumption made me think that maybe, as she says, the most compassionate thing for me to do for myself is to just not eat sugar, at all. The back-and-forth cravings swing is just too hard.
I’m still thinking about it.
Meanwhile, I’ve been in denial about my really “needing” to do this diet/detox program. I thought that if I did actually have candida, it was a mild case and could be eradicated with a fairly modified version of the diet. I really felt like I was doing this whole thing more for spiritual or energetic reasons than for physical ones. I thought that I could do it for a month and then move on. I thought that I could pick and choose the parts I liked of the many versions of the diet, and/or that not eating sugar and wheat would be enough of a shift in my eating habits to kill the candida.
Well, I still have it, so now what? And, as I said in my last post, it wasn’t a surprise that I still had it, but still, having it confirmed with an actual test makes it hard to kid myself any more.
Then again, why am I doing this exactly? Does it really matter if I have candida? Depending on whom you ask, 30% or 80% of people are walking around with candida and don’t know it. So what’s the big deal. It’s not like I feel like I need to be totally pure and clean to be okay. I live in a city, after all. There is no totally pure and clean here.
And let’s face it – it’s not like I have felt that great on the diet. I lost ten pounds (or seven, depending on the day), which is nice, but I’ve been tired as hell, crabby, and, as I said, so damn constipated I could scream. Until today. Now I have the other problem, the one I can never spell.
Anyway. Lots of unanswered questions for the time being.
While swimming in uncertainty about so many things, I have decided to take up the challenge and try to post something for which I am grateful (almost)everyday for November. This much I know:
I am grateful that I have a choice to either eat sugar or not. That I live in a place and time and culture of abundance (excess perhaps, but I’m being grateful), so that I can choose how and when and what to eat.
I’m grateful that I don’t have diabetes or another disease that makes the consequences of these choices potentially much more dire.
This will sound strange, but I’m actually grateful I have diarrhea at the moment. After feeling so completely blocked for a month, this latest “symptom” is a welcome relief! And I’m grateful, again that I live a life where this is actually welcome and not life-threatening.
I’m grateful for you, reading this.

I'm back?

I’ve been AWOL. Had pretty much been thinking in terms of having completely abandoned the whole blog business because I’ve been feeling too entirely overwhelmed by everything and can’t manage to even keep up with reading the blogs that I have come to enjoy in the short time since I’ve entered this strange world of blogging, let alone compose posts of my own. Besides I have found myself lately in a profoundly non-verbal space which is strange for me and not a little frightening, to tell you the truth, but that’s where I’ve been.
Plus, both my kids seem to have given up napping, so that’s been fun.
And then there’s the fact that I’ve been playing martyr in my marriage and offering up the minute parcels of “time to myself” that I have to my husband because he does, after all, earn (most of)the money and has been up nights finishing his work, and so who am I to claim need of such a thing as “time to write.” Ha. Not real healthy, I know, but for now, it's all I know how to do.
Meanwhile, I had my pap smear appointment the other day and talked to my midwife about what’s been going on with me and she did a test, which shows I have…..YEAST!! yes, five weeks into doing the candida diet yeast is still present in my body. I was not shocked. Disappointed, yes. Surprised, no. The good news is that she did not see it when she was down there,which means there was not a full-blown yeast infection. So that’s something.
Still. I’m still fighting the fungus.
That was the day before Halloween, so you can imagine what went down with all that candy in the house.
And the next two days I was involved in a focus group for…..SNACK CAKES!! I was asked to sample cream-filled, vanilla snack cakes. Four on the first day, three on the second, and then give my opinion.
Honestly, they were a little disgusting. It wasn’t just the sugar, but the artificial-ness of them. Yuck.
And since then, I’ve been giving myself a break from the diet. I’ll get back on track tomorrow, I think. It’s been interesting. I have not gone SUGAR CRAZY since its reintroduction into my system as I might have in the past. I haven’t thought, well, I’m “cheating” today, so I might as well eat complete crap all day long. There has been some new and different behavior going on here, which feels good. It's as if some kind of growth has occurred while I was looking elsewhere.
Today, for breakfast I might have had any number of things I’ve been “denying” myself for the past month, and might have even put pressure on myself to “live it up” while I’m “taking the day off.” But what I really wanted was a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and a little honey. So that’s what I had. Not exactly candida-diet friendly, but not a bowl of Sugar Snaps in chocolate milk, either.
So, anyway. I’ve been feeling a little nutty. Like thinking that I might actually be making a long-term lifestyle change, as opposed to a 30-day “diet” which is what I thought I was doing, and the shift in thinking has thrown me for a loop. I had no idea how much the things I eat are tied up with my identity. Also, how much of the way I eat is tied in with a lot of stuff about my mother. That both of these things have been so shocking has itself been a little shocking. These are the kinds of things I know but don’t really know I know or want to know that I know, but they’ve been right in front of me the whole time.
Also, I had such high expectations of this “cleanse.” Like I would struggle with detox the first week or so, and then have a cathartic moment where I would have a good cry and then afterwards I would feel light and clean and all would be right with the world.
Um, no.
The reality is that I still feel really bogged down, emotionally and physically. I have not cried since that day unloading the dishwasher even though I have needed to on several occasions, and I’m so incredibly constipated – despite the use of a two-week Enzymatic Cleasing Kit with includes both fiber and herbal laxative pills – that I literally broke into a cold sweat while sitting on the toilet the other day.
Fun times!
So, I may or may not be adjusting my expectations, and I may or may not explore this and more here. I’m not committing to anything. Everything is turning out to be very different from what I thought, which, I supposed, could be just fine.

a little dizzy

I’ve been in a funky place this week. Feeling overwhelmed, like I can’t keep up with things. My sinuses and itchy spots seem to have taken a turn for the worse, too. I’m starting to get to that obsessive place, wondering if it’s because I made some baked oatbran with carob chips, a recipe I found on one of the candida websites so it “should” be candida-friendly, but everyone knows that oats are a controversial grain (duh!), and so now I’m not sure if it’s something I should have eaten or not but then feeling crazy for feeling like I’ve strayed way off course because I ate OATS and UNSWEETENED carob, for crying out loud. This is the place I was afraid of.
And so, here I am - hyper-aware of every “symptom” and then wondering what it might be a “symptom” of – life?
I also have these crazy bruises all over my body. Not sure what that’s about. Has there been some kind of change in my blood chemistry? Or am I just really out of my body and trying to get back in?
I think I feel okay, being off the meds. (really??), although today I realized that I’m having trouble feeling like I’m kicking into gear. But that could be because of just about anything right now (see above).
I want to be able to just be here, where I am, without having to know “why,” as if my entire life is a disease.
Meanwhile, had a couple’s therapy appointment yesterday and am feeling very confused about that. About reality. I love my husband and he loves me and yet part of me feels very closed off or shut down or dead. And then there’s all the “why” questions again. I’m beginning to look at myself and my behavior and its impact in new ways, which I think is a good thing but for the moment, while my perspective is dramatically shifting, I feel myself reaching for the walls to steady myself and slow everything down, but what do you know – the world just keeps on turning anyway.
I turn 39 today.

an experiment

I have two pills left. I have been taking Wellbutrin, an antidepressant, for the past six months (has it been that long already?), and in two days I will stop taking it. I think. I’m nervous about going off the meds, even if I feel ready. I don’t really have a sense of how they are affecting me, and so I don’t know how I will feel when they are out of my system. I don’t even know if I was actually depressed before, but I guess that’s part of the whole conundrum. It’s not a black-or-white thing.
But wait a minute. Yes. Now that I think about it, I was depressed. I was experiencing a darkness I had not previously known, but the sense of darkness was accompanied by numbness, so everything, even the memory of it now, seems muted.
I did not make the decision to take an antidepressant lightly. It was one of those things I thought I would never do. I believed that antidepressants were taken in situations where there was a vague, free-floating kind of heaviness with no identifiable cause. I felt as if I could point to specific things in my life that I knew were causing me pain. The answer, then, was to “fix” the problems. If I took a drug to make the pain go away, I might forget I had problems and would be tricked into thinking they were gone. I was afraid I’d be a Stepford Wife.
But the medication did what my therapist at the time said they might: gave me some perspective, lifted me out of a deep pit of darkness. I feel more clear now than I have in a while. I’m still aware of the issues in my life and feel the pain of them but I do not feel hopeless and despairing over them.
I do not feel depressed.
Sometimes I feel like I didn’t really “do” anything to feel better and so my current state of more-happy was not fully earned or deserved or is somehow not real. I might only feel this way because of the medication. I guess we’ll find out.
I’m also not sure if I’m going off of them the “right” way. When I started taking them, the doctor gave me three days of a half-dose to take before the full dose began. Now I’m just stopping. I’m also not sure if it’s wise to go off them now, during this cleanse of sorts, given that the carb withdrawal has sent me reeling through dramatic shifts in mood and energy level. I guess we’ll find out.
I know it might be best if I was under the care of a physician at the moment, but I don’t feel like it. I’m not sure if I’m being childish about that or if I’m listening to some inner wisdom that tells me everything will be okay. I guess we’ll find out.
Meanwhile, I am working on being present, remembering to choose happiness, and accepting the parts of myself that butt in and keep me from doing that. I am open to being sad. I’m afraid of not being able to not be sad. I want to learn to let myself fully feel and express my sadness so that I can let it go. I’m not sure what will happen now. I guess we’ll find out.

I’ve been thinking about Karen’s posts over the past few days, about happiness and how we think about happiness. And wouldn’t you know it, just today I happen to open a book to this poem:


The Happiest Day
by Linda Pastan

It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn’t believe. Our children were asleep
or playing, the younest as new
as the new smell of the lilacs,
and how could I have guessed
their roots were shallow
and would be easily transplanted.
I didn’t even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.
So we sat on the porch
in the cool morning, sipping
hot coffee. Behind the news of the day –
strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere –
I could see the top of your dark head
and thought not of public conflagrations
but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder.
If someone could stop the camera then . . .
If someone could only stop the camera
and ask me: are you happy?
perhaps I would have noticed
how the morning shone in the reflected
color of lilac. Yes, I might have said
and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

communing vs cheating

Last Sunday I attended a baby shower. At the shower, I ate pasta, blue cheese, bread, mushrooms and CAKE, among other things which were or were not on the “allowed foods” list I have been trying to follow. I have decided to be okay with this. Before going, I considered the fact that the shower was going to be held at an Italian restaurant, and I weighed some options for lunch: I could eat only “allowed” foods and abstain from others, a choice which might involve picking through the salad bowl as it was being passed around the table or requesting a complete ingredient list from the wait staff. I could take whatever is offered and move the food around on my plate. I could tap my fork against my water glass and make an announcement: “While I am happy to be here, I will not be eating lunch today because I’m not consuming wheat dairy sugar fungi as I am trying to rid my body of candida which is a systemic fungus….” And then go into more detail, as requested by the other guests.
I pretty much thought I would do what I did, which might be called “cheating.”
But I’m not calling it that. I’m calling it “communing.” I took part in a ritual. I might have done so without the cake, but I had my cake and said mmmm with everyone else. Because I wanted to. I worried a bit about the ritualizing, in general, of eating certain foods simply to have an excuse to eat what we know is not good for us, a custom quite prevalent in our culture and most definitely in my family. Any occasion is an occasion to eat, and to “cheat” on whatever particular diet we might be following at the moment, so that we can then punish ourselves again on Monday. But then Monday is “woo-hoo Monday!!” Time to eat donuts. And on and on.
But this felt different. At this event in particular, I wanted to celebrate life and affirm the pleasure of cake-eating. It seemed important to not worry about “rules” and enjoy myself with the other women in my family, cousins I see only on holidays, and with Elizabeth, the mom-to-be, because the baby we were welcoming has spina bifida. He will be born via planned C-section and taken immediately for surgery to close his spine. More surgeries will follow. Beyond that, much is uncertain.
I wasn’t sure what the tone of the shower would be, or if any of this would be acknowledged. I was happy to see that Elizabeth seemed excited and nervous in the way most moms-to-be are nervous as they near their 8th month of pregnancy. She looked beautiful as she unwrapped the onesies and the changing table pad. She was excited to receive the exersaucer and the bouncy seat she had carefully selected for her registry at babies r us.
There was no sign that she felt in any way “cheated” of a healthy, “normal” baby. She was already in love with her son.
The cake being passed around looked delicious. I took a slice and enjoyed every bite.