Mystery solved..(health TMI warning!)

[marydell]

So, I've been having various health woes, and whenever I go through a thing that involves a lot of coughing, I end up with a weird esophageal thing involving terrible acid reflux and food getting stuck when I try to swallow for a couple of weeks.  It's unpleasant and scary.  I get milder versions of it from time to time, and I have chronic reflux, but this is the more intense version.  I'd been managing, this time around, by eating a lot of eggs and cheese and yogurt, since they're easy to swallow.  It's a bit problematic though, because I'm allergic to eggs, and allergic to dairy.  Not severely allergic; I can tolerate it if I don't have too much. 

Apparently I've had too much.  Yesterday I was sicker than I've been since I was a kid, with fever and vomiting and horrible bouts of burning acid and more vomiting.  But all the woes were upper-gi, so not food poisoning.  By the end of the day it was clearing up--I didn't have anything to eat all day, but drank a lot of gatorade and sprite and water, and a little tea and chicken broth.  And tums and zantac. Today I feel as weak as a kitten, but am otherwise fine, with no reflux for the first time in a couple of weeks. Oatmeal, chicken, and rice have so far gone down fine with no getting stuck or pain. 

It would seem that I have this: http://allergies.about.com/od/foodallergies/a/ee.htm, or at least I have all of the symptoms, including getting bad reflux from milk or milk products, which is sort of the opposite of everybody else.

If true, the good news is that I don't have GERD or an esophageal ulcer, and that I can clear it up by avoiding the foods that I'm allergic to, that trigger reflux for me.  The bad news is that those foods are dairy, eggs, peanuts, and garlic.  Live is no fun without these foods. NO fun.  I've had no success in the past living without them, and I have managed to entirely give up chocolate, so I'm not totally lacking in will power, but mostly it's not my strong point.

On the other hand, I do not like choking on my food, and I do not like throwing up, or trying to sleep in a recliner, or any of the other things that I seem to have been bringing on myself.  So I'm going to try to go dairy & egg-free for at least a few weeks, and see how I end up feeling.  Wish me luck. 

Comments

[gryphynshadow.livejournal.com]

Wow, massive suck! I'm sorry to hear about your food woes...

I'm sure you know about various substitutes for eggs and dairy, but I'll just toss in my few cents just in case.

Silken tofu substitutes for eggs pretty well. Use an equal amount, volume wise, of silken tofu per egg. You can bake with it and use it as though it were beaten eggs in scrambled eggs or omelets. If you bake with it, you have to add more leavening agent to make the baked good rise.

Soy milk cooks like cow milk does, as does rice milk. Almond milk makes really yummy hot chocolate (or hot caramel milk, which is also way nummy.) You might ask your allergist about using goat milk instead of cow milk, it's closer to human type milk and some people have better luck with it.

There are vegetarian and vegan 'cheese' products, you'll have to experiment to find which one tastes best to you. Cheese is one food I've never managed to give up, so I don't have much advice there.

Oh, for recipes and stuff, check out a couple of LJ communities, they're on my profile page if I get the names wrong, but they're basically vegrecipes and vegan cooking groups. They do product reviews and people share egg and dairy free recipes and stuff.

Good luck with the food restrictions! Here's to not sleeping sitting up!
J.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info! I'll look up the LJ communities. I've tried a lot of the substitutes--unfortunately I have mild sensitivity to soy, which eliminates 90% of substitute stuff. Right now I can have small amounts of soy without trouble, so I don't want to increase my intake and have it end up on the verboten list. What I'm hoping is that a couple of months of total avoidance of dairy & egg, including the animals they come from, (lots of rice and lamb in my immediate future) will get me back to a decent health baseline so I can have nips of milk or egg here and there, as they occur naturally in essential things like cake.

I went through this drill 12 years ago when I first got diagnosed, and it worked reasonably well, but I've gone really off the wagon in the past few years. This particular event was precipitated by having 4 meals in a row that involved easy-to-swallow eggs and cheese...I am a dumbass.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Hoo, boy. That's really rough. I have poor willpower, myself, and love dairy products. I can imagine trying to give them up unsuccessfully. But it sounds like you really do need to. It isn't worth being miserably sick.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm telling myself that the silver lining would be allowing myself an occasional taste of chocolate. Then I laugh at the notion of "occasional" and "chocolate" occuring in the same sentence for me. I used to be a daily choco-toker so had to go cold turkey.

[readinggeek451]

Good luck!

I suck at avoiding things I shouldn't eat (not allergies, mainly sugary things), so I can sympathize with that. And my mother has developed a whole long list of weird food allergies, so I know how hard it can be to tailor a diet to avoid common--and tasty!--foods.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Mercifully I am not allergic to cane sugar, since it is the backbone of my nutritional strategy :)

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

oh, man, I'm sorry, but I will be happy to share the vegan cupcake recipes I have.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Once I get onto the cooking stage of things, definitely. Right now I'm just surveying the cupboard and going "neep?" because I'm still recovering from the flare-up. Instant oatmeal is my friend.

I have hopes that I'll be able to tolerate small amounts of the stuff, once I heal my innards. Theoretically that's how it should work, but meh.