simont | Weak and feeble

Weak and feeble

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.

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It's stuff like this that makes me particularly cross with Creationists.

My friend Justin once commented that the best thing to say to a creationist banging on about the improbable perfection of the eye was "Now take your glasses off and say that again."

I can sympathise with the cross-contamination nightmare - it's why I rarely eat out. I've got no idea whether there is a scientific mechanism for it, or even if it's physiological at all and not just mind over matter, but I've noticed that I seem to react more to stuff if I've been a bit under the weather for a few months. Or put the other way round, I've noticed I'm so much generally healthier in completely daft and unrelated ways now I'm doing loads of exercise. Wierd, huh?

<creationalist>This things are sent to Test us</creationalist> or something.

I have a wonderful image now of the Brick Testament Yahweh sloping off to the pub with a bloody axe in His hand...

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

This started me off with the impression that you were the human equivalent of a flask of nitroglycerine :)

It does all sound terribly wearing, in combination particularly. I have a friend with coeliac disease, and it's incredible to watch the lengths she has to go to just to stay out of hospital :-\

You Are Not Alone. I'm not coeliac, but (as you know) I am impressively intolerant to caffeine - I can't drink decaf coffee at all, it sets my IBS off, and half a cup of tea is usually approaching too much as well. I'm also pretty much off alcohol for my innards' sake at the moment too. I haven't worked out all the things that trigger my IBS yet, it seems to come in phases related to stress as much as to be certain foods though if I'm already in one of the sensitive phases then over-rare or slightly elderly meat is a dead cert. I also can't eat anything too rich and fatty without nasty consequences, three days of hotel/restaurant food makes me feel like death warmed up, and I suspect I'm allergic to seafood in a mild to moderate way too.

Apparently though, booze interfering with your sleep is universal, not just you and me; it relaxes you so you *fall* asleep, then dehydrates you and converts into sugar in your body so you wake up thirsty and on a sugar high. Go figure; unless you're drunk enough to stay passed out all night, you're stuffed. I've always found I wake up again after a few hours if I've been drinking.

I get the same effect - if I'm generally under the weather my IBS is much more easily set off. Wouldn't know about the effects of a lot of exercise though, since I'm allergic to that as well ;-)

In theory, you'd be able to come and eat with us, anytime, with a bit of notice. My mother in law has Coeliac disease, and I've catered once for a vegan with gluten and dairy intolerance!

In practice, however, my dining table is lost beneath a heap of junk!

Until recently I also avoided caffeine, because it did to me what it does to you now. However, these last few years I've been able to drink more and more and now I can have a few cups a day. I must have stolen your ability to have caffeine!

Bizarrely, booze either turns off my drowsiness subsystem, so that I can't get to sleep at all, or makes me sleep like the dead, through alarm clocks and falling skies. The kind of booze seems to have an effect, though of course most beer complicates the matter by containing a herbal sedative...

Sorry :-/

ah! of course, that's why i can't sleep if i've drunk Proper Beer (TM). said herbal sedative has exactly the opposite effect on me.

-m-

*hugs* s'ok. It's not exactly your fault - to some extent it's unreasonable to expect you to vet each and every ingredient before cooking for a coeliac, not least because it's not even conveniently possible due to the Coeliac Society's tight restrictions on their GF foods database. One of these days I'm going to get round to complaining about that to them.

The only thing I can sensibly do about it is vet the ingredient list myself before people start cooking for me - and that's a pretty hostile and ungrateful way to treat a host...

Wish I'd thought of that one when being occupied by a creationism argument while waiting for my opticians to open of a morning. Instead, I fell back on my trusty "So how come the octopus got the better model?" and comparative performances of cameras (made by fallible man) and eyes.

"So how come the octopus got the better model?"

Because God is a Cephalopod. Or looks like a man with a cephalopod attached to His face, maybe.

Hmmmm... you're sounding suspiciously like me. As well as the coeliac thing, I could have truthfully written the paragraph about caffeine, if '2001' were changed to '1998'. However, I can smoke cannabis without it having any discernable effect on me whatsoever, and I don't have problems sleeping in hot weather.

I should invite you round to dinner sometime (I hope I'm one of the three or four people you could trust to cook for you!)

Thanks for the Asda/GFB tip-off.

Creationists blame our imperfections on the Fall. I know this, because on Monday I spent several hours talking to my creationist cousin, who thinks that all my faith-related problems would be solved if I stopped believing in macro-evolution.

macro-evolution

Now *there's* a term gets right up my nose. I believe it's a mis-spelling of "false dichotomy".

Yes, you were certainly one of the people on my OK list; I'm willing to trust that anything you eat yourself is also likely to be safe for me :-)

(Pre-emptive arse-covering: of course, when I say "three or four", I mean three or four who immediately occurred to me but there might be others I'd forgotten; so if three other people should subsequently ask this question and I confirm that they're on the list as well, the fifth shouldn't necessarily be offended.)

I know how you feel; I had my parents buy some food for dinner from a supermarket whilst we were away which contained wheat when they assumed that it did not. I think that this showed to them exactly how hard it was for me to avoid wheat when I looked at the chinese ribs (dismissed them out of hand; shop brought chinese stuff is almost guarenteed to contain wheat thanks to soy sauce), sauages (again, dismissed out of hand due to rusk) and processed turkey rasher things (damn maltodextrin). Ended up going back to the supermarket to pick up plain chicken and a few other bits and pieces.

Personally I'd use the word "allergic" rather than "intolerant" as it would appear that people pay more attention if you say that you're allergic to something rather than intolerant.

I'd be happy to cook food for you if you like.

I don't think it's something that anyone would object to, or even feel put out by... the last thing people want is to harm their guests!

(insert ObKinkDisclaimer about guests who specifically want to be harmed)

IA! Cthulu, FTANG! :)

the human equivalent of a flask of nitroglycerine

Well, I did mention spontaneous combustion further down the entry :-)

(If I wanted to be a suicide bomber, I wouldn't have to carry any dodgy stuff through airport security. Just get me to the target area and give me a bread roll, a pint of beer and a cup of coffee; I could mix well, down in one, and *boom*. Adding cannabis as well would probably make me near-thermonuclear, but that starts to get back to the airport security issue; although I suppose if I ever conceive a desire to nuke Amsterdam... :-)

Me too.

What's wrong with the term? I believe it's necessary so creationists can say "I believe purple moths turn into pink moths, but I don't believe fish turn into birds"

Your second sentence is the answer to your first.

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.

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 :-/

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.

What exactly do you want to complain to them about?

The computerised food database in which I look up any product I'm not already sure about is distributed under a very restrictive copyright licence which wouldn't look out of place in the MPAA but seems decidedly odd coming from a charitable organisation. The effect of this is that I can't legally give my friends access to a copy of the database, which means that the Coeliac Society is deliberately making it difficult for my friends to know in advance what I can and can't eat and thus making it inconvenient to cook for me. Since I'd have thought the CS's entire purpose ought to be to make the lives of coeliacs easier rather than harder, this seems like a very strange decision.

(Of course it's entirely possible that the licence agreement wouldn't stand up in court, or that they wouldn't in practice find out or bother doing anything about it if I flagrantly violated it. But I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have a good shout at them for behaving, well, uncharitably than quietly ignore them.)

It's CTHULHU FHTAGN, man! Now The Great Old One's going to eat your brains last when he comes, being the tentacle-faced spelling pedant that he is.

These trials are part of the Intelligent Design. They are intended to strengthen you in the Faith.

Or maybe He has mastered Mass Customisation and doesn't like you. Personally.

Interesting talk on maladaptation here (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/Articles/Nesse-MaladaptNatSel-QRB-2005.pdf).

We are no longer the Knights Who Say "Cthulhu F'Tang!", we are now the Knights Who Say "Hastur Hastur Hast...<crunch>"

(Grins) I was always doomed to spend eternity being slowly digested by the Elder Gods anyway - Bad spelling here is the least of my sins.

(Thanks for the correction though, I can't beleive I got it that badly wrong...)

And then... silence.

(with some quiet whimpering)

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.

I feel like this about RSI and migraines *hug* The good thing about the RSI is that I've managed to set things up now so that I only remember I'm disabled when I want to use other people's computers, or people look over my shoulder and ask what the blinky thing stopping me typing for 30s is for.

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