2010 Jan. 2

Haven't made up my mind yet about how frequently to post. But, since I started the new year off so well, decided I might as well post again today.
Health tip number 2: Stop eating all processed foods. That is a hard one. If you start reading labels, you will discover that you are not eating processed "foods," rather you are eating stuff that is manufactured and is all chemicals. Before I had all these health issues, I ate it all and didn't give it a second thought. When the drs. didn't seem able to help me, it fell to me to try and figure it all out and a very long and winding path led me to face the fact that I wasn't eating food, I was consuming chemicals. The things the FDA approves are unbelievable. We should not be eating these things and feeding them to all our children.
So what are all my heath issues? That is a lot to discuss. In April 2007, I woke in the middle of the night with a pain so severe in my left eye that my husband had to take me to the emergency room. The ER dr. put a painkiller in my eye, told me my pupil was huge, had me try to read the eye chart and discovered that I could only see the "E" and nothing else. He called the opthomologist who decided that he really didn't want to get out of bed right then and told me to come to his office the next morning. We did. To make a long story short, he told me it was a corneal erosion due to dry eyes and that the eroding happened to take place in my field of vision. He told me to put otc drops in it during the day and dry eye ointment at night. A few days later, I discovered that my left eye was protruding. Back to the eye dr. He tested me for Grave's Disease and sent me for a scan that would detect a tumor. My thyroid was "high normal" and there was no tumor. The eye dr. had no diagnosis for me. He said it was all due to "inflammation" and he could give me steroids for it, but as soon as I quit taking them the condition would return. I was told to come back if it got worse. It did. I went back and still no diagnosis or treatment. This went on for awhile. The eye dr. suggested I see my primary care physician. I didn't really have a pcp, but I got one and went to see him. In the mean time, I started doing research. Thank goodness for the Internet. Since the only sort of diagnosis coming to me was inflammation, it was a place to start. Long story short, thought maybe I had Celiac disease and the pcp tested me for it and said that it was negative - not enough antibodies showing up. I said, well why do I feel better if I don't eat gluten (that was my first eating experiment) and he said he didn't know. Plus, now in hindsight, I ask why would a person have any antibodies at all if gluten isn't a problem? I went back to eating gluten and got sicker than I already was. The eye thing was only one of lots of things that were going wrong with me health wise. I found if I told any dr. too many symptoms at once, they thought I was crazy and that seemed counter productive to me. So on any office visits I tried to stick to a couple of things and never got an answer for any of them. Sigh. Finally, the pcp sent me to an endocrinologist and he kept testing my thyroid and telling me that it was "high normal" and he couldn't treat me for a condition I didn't have. Meanwhile, I had started having anxiety attacks and that further convinced every dr. that I was crazy. Well, dear reader, I had lived through a lot of years of stress and had never had an anxiety attack before all this. The endocrinologist gave me a beta blocker to stop the heart palpitations and anxiety attacks. I am still on it and would like to get off of it because I believe that it was a lack of vitamin b12 that was causing it. That conclusion comes after a lot of research. Now, I have to go back to a new dr. and see if I can quit taking it. Well, this is just the beginning, but it is enough for now. More later.
Sheila H.