Weak and feeble

[simont]

I'm starting to get annoyed by the fact that I'm so biochemically unstable.

Coeliac disease is the obvious starting point: not only can I not eat obviously wheaty things like (ordinary) bread and pasta, but I have to be insanely careful of cross-contamination from things containing trace amounts of gluten. This makes it very difficult to eat anything I haven't cooked myself, either at restaurants or at friends' houses; there are only about three or four people I currently trust to cook for me, and it's annoyingly common when I risk letting someone else do it that I get most of the way through a delicious meal and then they tell me what one of the ingredients was and it rings an alarm bell.

In addition to that, as some of my readers will already know, I'm hypersensitive to caffeine. I haven't always been: I can pin it down reasonably accurately to mid-2001, at which point I suddenly started to find that drinking any perceptible amount of coffee gave me something approaching a panic attack. These days I find that a cup of decaff gives me something like a normal caffeine buzz, four cups of decaff make me uncomfortably jittery, and the last time I tried drinking even half a cup of ordinary coffee I got panicky and paranoid. (Oddly, though, I seem to be fine with tea, so perhaps it's not the caffeine but something else in coffee specifically.)

I'm currently off alcohol, because I suspect it of interfering with my sleep, and since some of the recent hot weather has certainly been interfering with my sleep I decided to stay sober for a few weeks on the basis that my sleep needed all the help it could get. (Particularly annoying is that last week I found some Hambleton GFB – a gluten-free real ale which I've wanted to try for a while – in Asda, and now I have to wait until I think I'm ready to go back on booze before I can drink it!)

I'm also unpleasantly hypersensitive to cannabis smoke. This one doesn't cause me a problem very often, thankfully; I think there have now been a total of two occasions on which I've been in the same room as someone smoking a joint and it's affected me. The effects are hard to describe, but I definitely don't like them, and in particular they seem to involve disturbed sleep. (The other problem with this one is that not everybody is willing to admit to smoking dope, it being technically illegal and all that, so it can be socially difficult to arrange to be warned in advance so I can leave the room! Not being able to get advance warning from the smell doesn't help there either.)

This is just getting beyond a joke. It's particularly aggravating when several of these things cause me trouble in the same evening; occasionally I feel that if I have to say one more time ‘I'm sorry, I can't eat / drink / go anywhere near that, I'm intolerant of it’ I'm just going to scream. It's also annoying because five years ago I had none of these problems; I was fine with alcohol and caffeine, coeliac disease was something that happened to my grandfather but not to anyone else I knew, and I might or might not have been hypersensitive to cannabis but it didn't matter because nobody I knew used it. Somewhere between then and now I've turned from a reasonably robust human being into someone brittle and fragile who has to avoid any number of perfectly normal things because they variously cause me to get cancer, lose sleep, panic or (I wouldn't be too surprised) spontaneously combust.

It's stuff like this that makes me particularly cross with Creationists. I can only assume that most fundie Creationists are extremely physically fit and healthy and have no food intolerances, no minor ailments, no dodgy muscles or joints, no missing senses and no aggravating psychological quirks; because some days I'm incapable of inhabiting this body or this mind for more than half an hour at a time without it being totally and infuriatingly obvious to me that it was designed very badly by trial and error. Intelligent design? Pah. You can stick it. If there was an act of intelligence in the design of the human body, it was the one where the designer realised that a sizable portion of the species would still worship him no matter what he did, and hence there was no reason he couldn't get away with doing a quick and shoddy job and sloping off early to the pub.

Comments

[teleute.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking thoughts +suspiciously similar to this recently, after staying with friends and having two fairly major upsets due to my physical intolerances. For me it's caffiene, chocolate, high fat dairy (as in, all the fun stuff) and sugar. I have hypoglycaemia (think reverse diabetes) and mistakenly ate far too much sugar when we went out for dessert one night: I then had to deal with jitters and shakes and nausea as well as an upset stomach. I recall thinking that 'normal' people don't have to watch their food intake so carefully, but I think actually it's becoming more common. I read an article on the plane home that said nut allergies are increasing (perhaps the diagnosis is more accurate?) and posited that it is because we no longer have seasonal diets, but eat pretty much the same thing each week/month. Although I would have thought that with wheat products (which were made year round and nut products (which were eaten because they kept year round) this would always have been the case.

You have my sympathy and my empathy.

[simont]

More accurate diagnosis is apparently part of the thing with coeliac disease as well, according to my gastroenterologist. In the 18th century, coeliac disease was something you only noticed in people who there was really obviously something wrong with - they hadn't grown up properly due to not having been able to absorb half their nutrition. Now we have incredibly sophisticated medical science, they can detect mild forms of the same condition in people like me who'd never even noticed any unambiguous symptoms.

Losing high-fat dairy sounds like an absolute bummer. I can cope with the loss of bread and pasta, because I never used to eat that much of either in any case and also there are GF versions available; but I get near-religious about cheese above practically all other foods, and if I had to stop eating that I'd be really upset. (Fortunately for me, coeliacs are at risk of calcium deficiency, so in fact the dietitian told me it's more important than ever that I continue to pig out on cheese. :-) So, er, yeah. Sympathy in return :-/

[teleute.livejournal.com]

I tend to eat cheeses and cream and then complain rather than avoiding them altogether. There is only so much fun I can cut out of my eating. I love food, and I love to cook. Having to avoid too much would be very upsetting. The problem with the Greek dessert this weekend was that it was honey-soack shredded wheat with cream and custard-cream. Just too mcuh of everything to be digestable. The same quantity of cream with fruit would have been just about survivable. The same amount of custard, ditto. The sugar tipped me over the edge, and everything else made it worse. And this was with only half the dessert!

Adrian thinks I should see a dietician/doctor and find out if there is anything that can be done about hypoglycaemia. The web suggests not, but perhaps the professionals have some ideas for the critical/acute symptoms.