The Trials and Tribulations of my Tummy
My GI tract has been doing some super weird things over the last couple of years. When I eat pretty much anything, my stomach puffs up by 5 inches, and it gets totally hard. My answer to this conundrum up until now has been to only wear skirts, and only skirts with elastic waistbands, but it occurred to me that perhaps I should mention this to my doctor. So I did, which started me on a super fun game called “What the heck is wrong with this system, anyhow?”
The first thing I did was a CDSA test, which indicated that I have a lot of inflammation markers in my gut. This can be caused by a wide range of things, including Celiac, other food sensitivities, an infection, or cancer. Also, my happy bacteria were completely missing, which wouldn’t be totally weird, except that I’ve been taking probiotics filled with them for a few months, so somehow they’re getting gobbled up and not colonizing. And I had some little benign amoebas taking up residence.
So then we did a celiac test. Negative. That’s good, I guess, although at this point I’d rather have that than some of the other options. I took Flagyl for a few days to kill the amoebas (in case maybe they weren’t benign, and were causing the problems). It almost killed me, so I begged off of that for now.
Next stop, Elimination Diet. So this week I started my 3-week diet with no corn, wheat, soy, milk, eggs, red meat, caffeine, sugar, peanuts… pretty much nothing. I’m glad I’m on vacation this week while I get started with this, and I’m happy to say that I’m almost through day 5 and am still alive. I just finished a pretty decent lunch – homemade turkey chili over roasted potatoes, with slices of avocado on top. My life became a lot better when I figured out how to make a pretty decent representation of a rice crispy treat with brown rice syrup, almond butter, vanilla, and brown rice crispy cereal. I got to take those to the movies, and they were a perfect snacky treat.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be visiting the gastroenterologist, to see what she thinks about this whole thing. My tummy isn’t getting all that much better, but I’m going to go through this for 3 weeks so we know if it helps or not. As long as I have my rice crispy treats, I think it’ll be ok.
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