not so sick after all? maybe?

[I know, I know, I haven't posted on here in forever. Things have just been crazy busy. In any case...]

I went to the doctor today and got some exciting news. All of the crazy treatments I've done to take care of my allergies and guts have actually been working! I am actually getting better!

It's kind of funny. I was trying to get "well enough" to do some other treatments, but that preparation actually was what I needed more than the treatment itself! I was working toward going on low-dose immunotherapy (LDA), which is a special kind of allergy shot that actually works on food allergies (I highly recommend people with food allergies check it out!). You have to do lots of onerous things to get on it, but it takes years less than traditional allergy shots and you only have to get a shot quarterly, instead of 1-3x/week. In any case, doc found out I had some really bad gut flora problems that meant that my body probably couldn't make good use of the LDA, so that had to be treated first. In short, I'd been on so many antibiotics that it killed all of my good gut flora. When that happens, it's hard to tell if the body is actually allergic to everything, or if there's just all sorts of spurious inflammatory and allergic reactions from the badness going on in your intestines. In my case, it looks like the gut bacteria was the main problem, in my case!

Now I only have two true allergies showing up in my bloodwork, and neither of them are to foods. That's fewer than most people, especially living in the South (which is Allergy Central, if you didn't know). I'm still sensitive to about a jillion foods, due to all of this gut weakness, but now there's actually a chance that I can get better and re-integrate foods (very slowly!) into my diet. I may yet eat soy again! Also, I'm off almost all of my meds, and have had the fewest sickly/symptomatic days in a long time.

So, all in all a very exciting day, but also a day with lots of conflicting emotions. First, I'm kind of anxious about even saying anything about it. I'm so afraid that I'm just going to jinx myself and bring some horrible health consequence upon myself. But I've been doing better and better for about eighteen months now, so I figure I can actually say *something* at this point. Also, I think I don't really believe in jinxing myself at this juncture. When I was younger, I felt like I actually could, since everytime I thought I was getting better I was getting worse again. Now I know that it was just because I actually did have a lot less control over my health. I was in situations that made it so much harder to consistently take care of myeslf. I was under crazy stress with school and then work, went through a couple 1,000 mile moves, was incredibly, incredibly broke, and didn't really know what I needed to know to take care of myself.

Those kinds of structural pressures can make it impossible to stay healthy. If I were a doctor now, knowing what I know, I'd be sure to remind myself of what my patients can and can't do, given their limitations, and advise them to do the interventions that would help them the most. For example, should doctors just assume that people can afford their meds, or that they have enough time to get enough exercise and eat well? What kind of advice can they give for improving health in the course of a real person's day? If I had someone with my problems, I would have advised them to focus their money on taking better care of themselves, rather than spending hundreds a month on prescription, OTC meds, and doctors visits. I would have told them about how frozen vegetables can be just as cheap as store bought white bread. I would have said that you can't live on Mac and Cheese alone.

As much as I feel like I'm in a better position to stay healthy, I'm also really worried about relapsing. Throughout the course of my illness I've always had times of feeling relatively OK, and then been smacked down again by feeling crappy, so it's hard to trust a good time. If I get in the situations that made me sick in the first place (living in a moldy home, taking lots of antibiotics, moving to places where I can't stand the local allergens, over-exposing myself to certain foods like cheese, wheat, soy), I could get sick all over again. Knowing that kind of kills me a bit. But I can't let that get me down... I know I just have to be thankful for finally figuring this out, and knowing where to go from here.

I am the closest I've ever been to a clean bill of health, but it is still going to be A LOT of work. Having typical allergies almost sounds easier than having sensitivities, because then I could take the treatment and it would actually work within about a year. Instead, I have to continue being ridiculously dilligent about what I put into my body until I get healthy again. It's a lot of pressure on me, and requires a hell of a lot of discipline. It feels like it would be so much easier to just rely on medicine and a cure, but that's probably one of the big problems with America. We expect health promotion and medicine to be all about "fixing us when we're broken," rather than accepting the hard reality that health is a day to day practice, predominantly determined by the patient's behavior. Most of the major things that plague us and go wrong with us, such as heart disease, diabetes, digestive disorders, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, allergies, and arthritis can be improved by taking better care of ourselves, but so many Americans don't know how, and many that do still don't do it. And it's not like our busy lives, packed to the seams with both work and friends/family, makes it easy.

Also, I got some crappy health news in the last couple weeks, which does put a damper on this semi-clean bill of health. Yeah, the abdominal pain I've been in on and off since March or so may actually be an ovary gone wrong; a cyst, an infected cyst, torsion, something... they don't know yet. I get an ultrasound soon, and then they go from there. I don't even know what I want to happen from this. On the one hand, I hope they find something so that I have an explanation for the pain, and a plan for getting better. On the other hand, most of the treatment options are not so good. They range from monitoring it, in which case the pain doesn't go away, to having an ovary taken out. As much as I don't really have plans for that ovary, and kind of like the term "oophorectomy," I know that having an ovary removed would be a pretty serious deal. In any case, no need to get ahead of myself until we know more.......

In response to this new condition, several people in my life have made comments like "There's always something wrong with you!" or "I'd expect that, given all of your other problems!" These are kind of hard comments to take, as neither of them really mesh with my understanding of myself as a person who is healing. First off, I am actually almost healthy, for the first time in my adult life. I will always have to work harder at it than other people, but I feel like I may actually get to live a normal life fairly soon. Second of all, this new problem has nothing to do with anything else that has happened to me. I guess there's some chance that it has to do with my body's tendency toward inflammation but... that's about it. This is something that can happen to anyone, and it just happens to be coming on the heels of fourteen years of other sickness for me.

In any case... figured all of this merited some comment. I'm hoping to get back on here more soon, to write about all the interesting stuff going on with health care in this country. It's such a pivotal moment... and yet a moment in which I have no time... sigh.