This morning I posted a rave review of Tosca Reno’s Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook. Why rave? Because it’s one of the first healthy-eating cookbooks I’ve tried that caters to those of us who are addicted to high-flavor foods, rather than bland, uninteresting stuff. Yeah, I know there’s a huge market for the latter, so I can’t in good conscience mark books down for catering to it, but damn it’s so good to find a book that caters to people who don’t want to sacrifice an awesome variety of tasty foods in order to be healthy!

We have at least three more book reviews coming out this week, two of which are also cookbook reviews. Stay tuned for a review of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook, among others!

Seriously, Tosca’s books have helped us enjoy our healthy eating enough that we’ve been able to keep up with it. And that’s great, because it’s helped me immensely. Finally one of those medical scans showed something; my gallbladder is contracting sluggishly. Not a clear-cut case of it needing to come out, so instead of referring me directly to a surgeon my doc is sending me to a gastroenterologist for another opinion. Eating so well using Tosca’s suggestions and things we’ve derived from her books has made me healthy enough that I can actually indulge in a treat now and then—like a small serving of chocolate bread pudding from the Ghirardelli cookbook—with only mild repercussions.

I’ve always had trouble getting myself to eat salads. They’re too much work to make interesting (i.e., include a variety of ingredients); they aren’t very good; etc. I have a new way of handling that, though. I prep some ingredients early in the week. For example, we take some hothouse (seedless) cucumbers, wash them, and run them through the food processor’s slicing disk. Then we stick them in airtight plastic containers in the fridge. I shred or slice some carrots, or buy them pre-shredded, and do the same thing with them. I’ve also started buying baby spinach instead of or in addition to lettuce, because it doesn’t go bad as quickly and it’s really good. Instead of buying large tomatoes I buy small pearl or grape tomatoes.

Anyway, this makes it much easier to toss together a salad quickly that contains plenty of interesting and delicious ingredients. I often add a few nuts or cubes of cheese; you can chop those in advance and store them too. And of course a small amount of dressing works wonders, too. Now you have a salad with lots of flavor that takes just a minute or two to create, no chopping necessary. And since you have containers of cucumber, carrot, spinach, and tomatoes on hand, you can easily toss a handful onto your plate any time you have anything else as well.

That headline up there is a bit more provocative than this post will actually be, but I didn’t want to make the subject line several sentences long.

Short version: In my more-than-30 years of experience, many older male doctors seem to attribute those illnesses that aren’t immediately visible and obvious as non-existent if the patient is female. To a lesser extent I’ve seen this in other combinations of ages and genders as a general medical attitude as well, but it seems more pronounced with that particular combo.

Long and very rambling version with several stories from my own and others’ experience: In my senior year of high school, I had splitting headaches that lasted for weeks on end. I got sinus x-rays and a cat scan, and my doc eventually came to the conclusion that it was “muscle contraction headaches.” (As soon as my mother and I left his office we looked at each other and said, “so, he just said stress headaches, didn’t he?”) We felt this was pretty ridiculous, but he was the doctor and knew better, right? (Heh.)

He put me on heavy-duty tricyclic antidepressants, at a dosage that later we found out was far too high for my size. I went from a normal senior in high school who hadn’t been depressed or having problems and who’d been getting A’s, to a zombie getting D’s. Eventually in desperation we turned to a chiropractor, who took x-rays of all his patients, and he noted what looked like teeth up where I shouldn’t have teeth. He sent me to a dentist—who tried to schedule an appointment with a TMJ specialist (until my mother, who at the time almost NEVER swore and tended to be very mild-mannered, actually swore at them and told them to make the appointment to take x-rays). Anyway, I turned out to have two wisdom teeth impacted against my sinuses. Took them out and my headaches went away.

Two interesting side-notes to all this: One, my step-mother, who worked at the local hospital in radiology, later had my sinus x-rays pulled and asked a radiologist to look at them. He commented that my sinuses were fine, but I really needed to get those wisdom teeth out! (I.e., my doc should have noticed them.) Two, even after the removal of the teeth and end of the headaches my doc refused to admit he was wrong. He wrote in “migraine headaches” on my college health forms.

At the time I tended to think this was an isolated experience with one lousy doctor. After all, he did get banned from the local hospital some time later due to frequent mis-diagnoses. However, this pattern has repeated itself many times, and while I’ve had several wonderful female practitioners who haven’t treated me this way, I’ve only had one male (out of several) who didn’t treat me this way.

It doesn’t help that I’ve inherited from my mother a tendency to have odd problems with symptoms that don’t necessarily fit precisely within expected paradigms, or that don’t test easily. I have weird reactions to medications and the like that doctors just can’t always make sense out of. Of course, so do many people I know.

A friend of mine was having inexplicable and incredibly uncomfortable stomach pain. Her doctor was busy, so she went to a different doctor in his clinic. That doctor was an older man, and he gave her a lecture about how she should deal with pain better, and at his age everything hurt, and she should be on anti-depressants (which she already was, and she was doing fine on them, thanks very much). She was so angry after that experience that she made a scene in the waiting room (I would have too at that point), and her doctor came out and quickly made time for her. As it turned out, she had a very simple issue with a stomach valve not opening properly that could be easily solved with the right medication.

In the case of a relative, after 10-15 years of her feeling cruddy and low-energy, they finally figured out that she has sleep apnea; once on a CPAP machine she felt worlds better.

Anyway. Because I’ve been exposed to this so much, I find I tend to constantly question myself when I feel that something’s wrong. I also tend to worry that my doctor’s going to think I’m a hypochondriac if I tell them about my symptoms, so I’m sometimes reluctant to tell them things—which doesn’t help them make a good diagnosis, so it’s not a good attitude for doctors to instill in their patients.

Take my current digestive-maybe-gallbladder issues. It’s pretty obvious to me that this isn’t normal. I’m nauseous after eating anything fatty. However, nausea and indigestion have been much bigger problems for me than the more normal abdominal pain that most people get with this; that’s been mild (although present). The first ultrasound was negative, and I’m assuming the pancreas-related blood tests last week were as well since I haven’t heard from my doc yet.

So, once again I found myself turning to my husband and saying, “do you think I could be imagining this?” And, since I know he’s capable of taking a pretty unbiased-yet-aware look at how I’m doing, it’s very reassuring to have him say, “no way. There’s definitely something wrong.” And yet, as I wait for yesterday’s scan results and wonder if they’ll show anything, I still find myself asking that question again.

I went in for the scan yesterday after the required four hours of no food or drink (it’ll be clear in a minute why this story is relevant). I went back to the exam room and the technician spent some time trying to find an adequate vein for the IV port. I ended up with tourniquets on both front arms while she smacked the backs of my hands (quite hard) trying to get the veins to sit up and pay attention. Eventually she picked one and inserted the port. It hurt like hell and, oh joy, I had a vaso-vagal reaction and nearly passed out. Then she administered the radioactive tracer and I spent an hour lying motionless on a hard surface under a big scanner, watching little white dots accumulate on a dark screen and trying not to move as my tailbone and lower back became more and more painful. Next came a saline IV and another half hour of motionless scanning.

Finally I was out of there, just in time for dinner. I was starving (for some reason my metabolism is such that I can’t eat much at once and need to eat often, and I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since a late breakfast). I was craving steak for some reason, and my husband graciously offered that after a long and/or annoying medical procedure one should get to eat wherever one wanted, so we went to Outback. I knew it was a bad idea; fatty foods have been making me sick. I have no excuse for those appetizers. I was dumb; I was stubborn; a part of me still wondered if I was imagining it; I was overly hungry. (But I have to admit, that crab dip is awesome!)

Thus it was that around midnight I woke up feeling incredibly nauseous. I got up and played video games for a couple of hours until it abated. My husband woke up when I went back to bed, and I explained why I was up. He said, “well, at least you know you aren’t imagining things now.”

He knows me so well.

To be fair to the docs, I grew up with an older male who had similar attitudes—anything he didn’t like or didn’t understand just didn’t exist, must be a product of one’s imagination, etc. This probably makes it much harder for me to have confidence in my own observations and get past my worries that they won’t take me seriously. But I do wonder how much of the attitude I’ve noticed hearkens back to when women were diagnosed with things like “hysteria” and “nervous breakdowns.” How many doctors out there still have attitudes tinged by those days?

Well, it’s definitely worth it to me to spend the time it takes hunting down one who listens to their patients and takes their concerns seriously, no matter the age or gender (of either the doctor or the patient).

With all this need to eat healthy & low-fat lately, I’ve been experimenting with ways to keep meals interesting, easy, and good for me. Here’s my breakfast cereal recipe:

• 2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (not instant)
• 2 cups mixed-grain hot cereal of your choice, or a mixture of whole grains of your choice (such as rye and barley flakes)*
• 1/4 cup toasted milled flax seed
• 1/3 cup unprocessed bran (oat or wheat)
• 1 cup unsweetened dried fruit, chopped if necessary (I like tart currants or mixed berries)
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans (or other nut of your choice, walnuts or almonds should work well)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup raw cane sugar (optional)

Stir well and store tightly closed. If you don’t expect to go through it quickly, store it in the freezer. When you want breakfast, put 1/2 cup of mix in a microwave-safe bowl, add 1 cup water or skim milk (I prefer the milk), and microwave for 2 minutes 30 seconds on high, or until done (depends on the microwave). You can also do larger or smaller amounts as long as you keep the ratio roughly the same (2 parts liquid to 1 part cereal). Make sure the bowl is large enough to accommodate the bubbling up of the cereal!

If fresh fruits are in season, consider chopping some and adding to your cooked cereal.

I find I need a tiny bit of sweetening (the dried fruit and small amount of sugar), but you can leave it out if you want to. Another alternative is to leave the sugar out of the recipe but add approximately one teaspoon agave nectar to the cooked cereal; agave nectar is a very slow-absorbing natural sweetener with a low glycemic index.

If you want a quick, easily-transported lunch, make a batch of this the night before, chill in the fridge, and toss a container of it into your lunch box; it’s very good cold.

Variation 1: Add 1 tablespoon cinnamon and 1 1/2 teaspoons allspice.

*As long as they’ll cook in the microwave in roughly the same amount of time as oats, they’ll work. This is why I use pre-packaged 5- or 7-grain multigrain cereals from the hot cereal aisle, because they’re usually designed with quick cooking in mind.

Bear with me for a moment while I quote from a post I made a few days ago:

Insta-food sucks. I end up living off of the stuff when my husband is out of town on business, as he was last week, and it really really sucks. At least the stuff from Trader Joe’s isn’t half bad, but last week I ended up eating stuff from the regular grocery store, and it was so horrid and fat-filled that the very idea of it made me feel nauseous by the end of the week. Yes, that was despite trying to pick my insta-food fairly carefully.

Okay, it hit the point where I finally realized that it’s not normal to feel that nauseous after having fatty foods, and I couldn’t chalk it up to a newfound aversion to unhealthy foods any more. So in one week I go for an ultrasound to find out if I’m having gallstone troubles.

In the meantime, I have to say for anyone else having this problem (since I’ve now read up on it enough to know that there are a lot of people with gallstone trouble out there), that a nice cup of instant miso soup is very settling to the stomach under these circumstances, even when you’ve hit the point where plain oatmeal made with 2% milk is kind of sickeningly fatty (next time I’ll just make it with water).

Well, nothing like having incentive to get healthy, particularly when you have difficulty with self-motivation. I consider this a well-earned kick in the ass from life. Anyway, if you’re wondering why I’m so slow lately about dropping by and commenting on blogs and the like, this is why.

Because I have a strong interest in psychology & mental illness (both through personal experience and through study—I was working on my degree in the field at Harvard before I moved away from the Boston area), and because such illness can affect pretty much all aspects of a mentally ill person’s life, it tends to come up when I discuss various issues with people. It’s a natural topic for me, like physical illness might be for a caregiver or for someone who spends much of their time battling physical illness.

Many people don’t feel comfortable discussing mental illness—particularly those who suffer from it—in large part because there are still so many misconceptions going around regarding the mentally ill. Various people have emailed me to thank me for being willing to discuss what it’s like to have a mental illness, because they feel they can’t; they know their family or friends wouldn’t understand, or they might be discriminated against or fired at work. Part of the reason I tend to be so open about my own illnesses is a desire to see this change. I want mental illness to be something that people don’t have to hide and be ashamed of.

Because I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by people who understand mental illness and those who suffer from it, I sometimes forget just how uncomprehending most people can be. Then the topic of mental illness will come up as a side note in some other conversation and I’ll get a brutal reminder of just how many mental illness myths remain in our society. So while this is hardly a comprehensive list of those myths, here are a few that tend to irk me, and my thoughts on them; I’m sure I’ll come back and add more later. I’m posting these here because I try so very hard not to hijack other people’s conversations.

Standard disclaimer: I’m not a professional. These are my own opinions. Blah, blah, etc.

1. You can recognize when someone has a mental illness. OR, It’s obvious when someone has a mental illness.

False, false, and SO very false. Even psychiatrists and psychologists often differ on whether a pattern of behavior should be classified as an illness and, if so, which one. If it were that easy there wouldn’t be a need for the damn profession. Also, symptoms are on a continuum, they aren’t either/or. Not to mention the fact that many symptoms, particularly when it comes to something like mood disorders or personality disorders, are normal behaviors taken to an abnormal extreme. Add to that the fact that many mentally ill people desperately try to hide the fact that this is what’s wrong with them, and in many cases you’ll have no idea that’s what’s going on with a person.

2. Very few people actually suffer from mental illnesses.

Wrong. The last time I heard a statistic, it stated that something like one in ten people suffer from a mood disorder alone, and mood disorders are only one variety of mental illness. I’m not sure I buy the statistic I’ve heard bantered about that one in three people suffers from some sort of mental illness, but the point is, it’s almost certainly more people than you think. Look around your circle of friends and relatives. Odds are very high several of them suffer and you don’t even know it.

3. Mentally ill people are fine when they’re on medication and you can tell when they’re off.

It isn’t that simple. It can take many tries to find the right medication, and some of those might partially work but not do the job well enough. Someone who’s normally fine on their meds might just have a particularly bad spell and suddenly their normal meds aren’t enough. Some illnesses are exacerbated by stress, and so things like deadlines, tests, breakups, family issues and so on might make things worse. Even then, a medication that works for a while might eventually stop working for whatever reason. Or it might help, but the side effects might not be tolerable. Similarly, medication that works beautifully for one person might not work well for the next. Psychiatry is a very inexact science, and there is no simple cure for mental illness.

4. Mentally ill people just use their illnesses as an excuse to avoid doing work.

Frankly, if someone wants to be lazy and use an excuse to avoid work, they’re going to find an excuse—whether or not they have mental illness to lean on in that department. There are plenty of people who have legitimate difficulties working for one reason or another due to their illnesses. Sure, many mental illnesses only sporadically act up enough to keep someone from working, but who’s going to want to hire someone who at any time could become too exhausted, distracted, weepy, or freaked out to get anything done?

Too many people don’t realize that there’s a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse is something you proffer to get out of blame or obligation. A reason is an understanding of why something happens that can help you to work around it, avoid a repeat of the same occurrence, or adjust your expectations. If more people would stop automatically assuming that people are using mental illness as an excuse and simply see it as a reason, then perhaps we could work together to find better ways to integrate mentally ill people into work, life, and school. Many mentally ill people would very much like to work and support themselves more than they currently do, but find it extremely difficult to do so for various reasons.

5. Mental illness is “all in your head.”

Hardly. Many mental illnesses are, in fact, genetic in origin or at least physical in cause. Studies have shown distinct differences in the brains of people with certain illnesses (even ADD/ADHD, which people like to claim all the time doesn’t exist)—unfortunately testing for these differences is too expensive to use as a diagnostic tool. Other mental illnesses that are caused by life circumstances can lead to changes in brain structure or function. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, causes vast changes in the functioning of the body’s hormone release systems. It also has been shown to cause changes in the development of certain structures in the brain.

6. Psychiatrists and psychologists label people as mentally ill when they’re simply lazy or difficult.

It is true that not everyone is correctly diagnosed, and that some people are diagnosed who shouldn’t be. As I said earlier, psychiatry is an inexact science, and as in every profession there are idiots as well as great practitioners. However, what you need to realize is that one of the basic diagnostic criteria for a mental illness is that it must significantly interfere with an individual’s ability to carry on in their work, relationships, or home life in order to be considered an illness at all. A responsible and well-educated psychiatrist or psychologist will not diagnose someone with a mental illness unless the proper criteria are met. That doesn’t eliminate the possibility of mistakes, but it certainly helps.

7. People are drugged up by psychiatrists when they should just be made to buckle down and get over it.

If it were that easy to work around a mental illness we wouldn’t have so many problems with it. However, here’s an interesting tidbit for you that many people aren’t aware of. It has been shown that drugs alone are no more helpful in the treatment of mental illness overall than therapy alone. Treat someone with both together, however, and the effectiveness of treatment goes up substantially and quite noticeably. Why is this? Well, consider the problem from both directions in turn. Therapy alone isn’t enough because most mental illnesses are physical in origin; if you don’t attack the biochemical imbalances directly then you can’t do much to alter them. Drugs aren’t enough because while most mental illnesses are physical in origin, they cause a huge amount of stress and uproar in a person’s life. Therapy helps people to address these difficulties. A good therapist can also teach a person coping mechanisms for stress, reducing its impact on their treatment, and can teach various means of dealing with the practical effects of mental illness on a person’s life.

Thus, while it’s true that a person needs to make changes to his or her life (and put in some effort) to handle their illness, they can’t just “get over it.” Both medication and the educated advice of a good therapist make a huge difference in the course of an illness.

Hopefully this will give you some idea of which myths you might be unintentionally buying into without even realizing it.

Edited to add: A fantastic page I stumbled on, Ways to Insult Someone with Depression—all those things NOT to say to someone who’s depressed.

I’ve posted my review of Dr. Jean Harvey-Berino’s The EatingWell Diet. It’s a good, solid book, and my only real problem with it was that much of the food in the cookbook section was too bland for my tastes. I have to admit, though, that when you have the attention span of a flea on crack (as I do), the concept of trying to consistently note your food and calorie intake is daunting, to say the least. Still, if I can even do it for a day or two here or there, I get a much better sense for how many calories I’m taking in and how much I need to cut out of my diet.

Perhaps more importantly, I learned that I really can’t expect much. If I look at the amount I’d need to cut from my diet in order to lose a whole two pounds a week, it dips below the minimum 1200 calorie diet recommended for good nutrition. Which means that, realistically, I can’t eat well and lose more than a pound a week unless I start getting some very serious exercise. It’s good to know this, because it means I’m less likely to get frustrated and feel like giving up if I go a month and only lose, say, three pounds.

I’ve blogged before about how much my old doctor sucked, and how much I needed to get off of my ass and find a new one. Well, I finally did it. I started out looking up a couple of clinics that I knew were close to home. I found that one was covered by my insurance, and happened to stumble across an online review saying glowing things about it. I also saw by the sign that it had a good handful of providers there, so I knew there’d be a few to choose from.

I still have to have my records sent to them and all that, but I needed to go see a doctor this week for a possible infection, so in I went this morning. The lady I saw apologized for being late—10 minutes late. This is after my last experience waiting 4.5 hours in a waiting room. Immediately I decided I was kindly disposed toward her.

The office was clearly very popular. I had a 7 am appointment (I love that they open that early!) and there was already a handful of patients present at opening. All the receptionists and nurses were actually smiling and friendly at that hour, which is a great sign. I knew they actually had some money invested in the place when I noted that instead of photocopying my insurance card and having me manually fill out all the information for it, they just scanned it in, much like the local hospital does.

That was nothing compared to the actual doctor visit, however. My doctor didn’t write anything down—she had a laptop for taking notes. She had a PDA with which she double-checked the prescriptions she was about to write me against my medications, and yes, she bothered to do that double-check to guard against unwanted interactions. She filled out my prescriptions on the laptop and just had them printed at the front desk for me to take with me. Clearly they have a nice budget and a willingness to make use of technology to make their work faster, easier, and more effective.

Best of all, though, she was a very cool doctor. She was nice and knowledgeable, and she listened. She seemed to be more up on things like allergic reactions (very important to me!) than previous doctors I’ve had. So now I have an antibiotic prescription to fill, and more importantly, I finally have a good doctor!

Unfortunately when I asked her if she could recommend a decent psychiatrist in the area, however—something no one has been able to do so far, since apparently they generally suck here—she just made a face and said that no, she didn’t know of any good ones. So apparently that’ll be a harder problem to solve. Still, one at a time. If I can find a good doctor, then I can find a good psychiatrist. It’s just a matter of time.

…OMG, I’m turning into an optimist!

Healthy Food doesn’t have to suck

Calories. The bane of my existence. I’m currently reading “The EatingWell Diet” for review; it’s a nutritionist’s guide to changing your eating habits long-term so that you can get healthy and stay healthy. One of the early things you do is calculate the number of calories you have to consume to maintain your current weight, decide whether you want to try to lose one or two pounds per week, and thus cut 500 or 1000 calories from that maintenance amount, as long as you don’t dip below 1200 calories per day. Of course at my height (did I mention I’m really short?) I had to round up to 1200 calories, naturally.

The book has you start out just tracking what you currently eat, because it’s really handy to see how much you actually take in, and just knowing that can often lead you to start changing your eating habits. I have to admit, I feel quite a bit of dismay to discover that, even eating healthy foods, it’s really easy to hit 1200 calories by early afternoon. Of course, there’s a reason for this—if you aren’t regularly exercising, you’re almost guaranteed to gain weight. And by exercising you can, of course, increase the number of calories you’re allowed to have each day. I’ll give it this—it gives one quite a bit of incentive to get out and get that exercise when you see those totals.

I am still glad that I read about the South Beach Diet, even though long-term it didn’t work out; it taught me a lot about the various types of fats and grains, and although my calorie intake still sucks, it did increase the quality of those calories, which is a first step in the right direction.

Anyway, back to reading that book with me. Coming soon: that review; the start of a new and unusual world-building article series from our business partner; and more T-shirt designs—I’m due to get a copy of Photoshop delivered today!

I know my doctor isn’t perfect, as I’ve mentioned before; he’s just been convenient (he takes walk-ins). I’ve been planning to look for a new doctor, and now I pretty much have to.

I went to his clinic yesterday with this allergic reaction—swollen eyes, slightly elevated blood pressure, all the fun stuff. That’s when I discovered that he’s changed his practice to something that I expect he considers semi-retirement. He only takes walk-ins now, and apparently he’s made deals with employers in the area such that he does the physicals and drug-testing for employment screenings.

There are signs up all over the office saying that they don’t take people back to the exam rooms in the order they arrive because they triage folks for who needs to go back first—this is something I understand and can live with. Certainly if I came in bleeding all over the floor I’d want to be seen before the person with the sore throat, and if I was the one with the sore throat, I’d also agree that the guy bleeding all over the floor should go first. However, over the time I waited to see the doctor, it became apparent what the triage priority was. Anyone who came in for an employment-screening physical had first priority. Anyone with an actual medical condition had last priority.

I waited for, literally, four and a half hours while folks (most of whom arrived after I did) went in and out getting their physicals at $90 a head, paid for out-of-pocket, because of course the clinic will make more money off of that than it will off of my insurance-subsidized visit. (And I’m not the only one who came for a medical reason who had to wait that long.) After 6 pm I finally went out and told the receptionist that my blood sugar was getting low enough that I would have to leave soon one way or the other, and miraculously he suddenly had time for me.

Money should not come before health. I understand that there are cases where that isn’t practical, but in this case it seems a simple case of the doctor deciding that the only thing he cares about is maximizing the money he makes. I wish the clinic had at least had the guts to say, “we’re shifting our priorities, and you should really look for a new doctor,” rather than lying about it. The receptionist was giving an estimate of an hour and a half wait to folks coming in the door, and that’s about what the folks with physicals had to wait. The difference between that and four and a half hours is ridiculous.

I was going to try to say something interesting (I just typed allergy instead of interesting… Freud would be proud) today, but instead here I am, doped up on Benadryl, having slept for about 12 hours while doped up on Benadryl, and waiting to go to the doctor’s. Just the week for my allergist to be on vacation. The last time I had a reaction this bad I ended up visiting the emergency room on a Sunday. Nothing like taking your Benadryl before bedtime figuring it might at least keep things from getting worse, and hopefully make things better, only to have your eyes go from somewhat itchy, scratchy, and puffy before bed to downright swollen up, stinging, and burning in the morning.

I’m more than a little burned out on going through the endless rounds of trying to figure out what I might be reacting to, eliminating everything possible from exposure until the reaction goes down. The hard part is sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a topical reaction from what’s internal, and I’ve been known to develop sensitivities to things I’ve been exposed to for years without a problem. So—the new shampoo I switched to after reacting to the last one? Unlikely, since my scalp doesn’t itch. The strawberries or raspberries I’ve been eating a lot of the last few weeks? Likely, since I can get sensitized to fruit. The new sunscreen I used recently? Normally I’d say likely since I’ve reacted to sunscreen in the past, but a reaction wouldn’t wait several weeks to set in, an I’d expect a rash on my arms, too. So, very unlikely.

Tomato? Possible; I’ve had a lot of tomato with eggy breakfasts lately in addition to my morning V8. It seems odd that it would have taken this long to show, so I’ll put it behind strawberry and raspberry in possibility, but it’s likely enough that I might want to cut it from my diet just in case. Avocado? Maybe; I’ve had a lot of it with breakfasts as well lately, but again, it seems to have taken a while. I’ll put it just behind tomato for likelihood.

Then that leaves all the random “who knows” things. Maybe I’ve gotten sensitized to coffee. Perhaps its the cats’ new litter—we ended up with a scented (ick) version because the store didn’t have unscented, but that would be more likely to kick off asthma, not swelling. Oh, wait—there’s the lip balm I switched to a month or two ago; better stop using that for now.

Urgh. I hate Benadryl when I have to take it during the daytime. I can feel my brain getting all woozy.

So for the moment, unless the doc tells me it looks topical rather than internal, I’ll cut strawberry, raspberry, and perhaps tomato from my diet and see if it gets better. If so, I’ll try at least reintroducing tomato since it’s such a staple ingredient, so it would be nice to find out I’m not reacting to it. It’ll take quite likely another week before I know if it’s working, though, even if the doc gives me some heavy-duty meds.

Party line is, if there’s facial swelling, call 911. I’m weird in that facial swelling for me doesn’t mean I’m having an anaphylactic (potentially fatal) reaction; that’s just my normal reaction to almost anything. So it’s a waste for me to do that.

I think I’ve hit the rambling part of the Benadryl dose, so time for me to sign off.