I Will Not Suffer In Silence

Catching up from last week again…

Thursday I stayed home instead of going to Pissup Night at the Tiki bar because no one was around. So I had two drinks on my own. Mind you, I’m supposed to be on the wagon again since declaring this after June 10th…

Friday two of my friends flew in from Seattle and came to visit the now famous Tiki bar on our island. We drank and drank. And they asked if I’d be joining them in San Francisco for a party on Saturday. I declined, citing traffic would be nasty all weekend due to the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, which my friends like to call Disneyland for Gays. Not just any Pride Parade, but THEE Pride Parade.

It’s huge, kind of like New York’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

My friends, undaunted by my fear of being caught in traffic, offered to take me home with them right then and there. How could I refuse? So I abandoned my poor man, got into the car, and was whisked away to San Francisco to stay the night in a condo full of gay boys.

We spent most of Saturday lazing about the house, and finally went out around noon for brunch and a walk around the Castro neighborhood - Ground Zero for all that is gay and prideful.
The party at the condo got started at 4pm and was still going when I left, happily buzzed on hours of booze, around 11:30pm.
The evening was not without my share of feeling VERY socially awkward and anxious. Drinking as always helped ease that immensely.

On Sunday, I got up, had breakfast and showered, and headed to….the back yard….
where a going-away party happened for our upstairs neighbors. We sat in the hot sun drinking Sangria and eating munchies. We decided it’s high time we ask our landlady for an umbrella for our table in the back yard, as we sat holding regular rain umbrellas to shade ourselves from the sun! Too funny.

So basically, from Thursday through Sunday, I drank booze.

Yesterday, the first big pre-george symptoms hit me. He’s due on Friday. The pain was dull in my uterus and radiated down to my knees. I was utterly exhausted from the moment I woke up for work until the time I went to bed again at the end of the day. I didn’t feel like eating healthy food or much food at all. When I did eat, I had to force myself to eat a piece of chicken and a waffle. When it came time for dinner, I had Cheetos and cheese dip. My legs felt swollen down to my ankles and hurt to the touch, probably because of all the sodium I’ve been consuming.

Today, the dull pain continues, and radiates to my friggin ankles. Today I started feeling like george had arrived, so I had to keep checking myself. I didn’t feel like eating a big breakfast, so I had a flax shake. This is my latest favourite thing in the morning:

6oz of 100% apple juice
6oz of water
2 bananas
4tbsp of flax seeds
Mix in a blender, pour into a pint glass. 2 servings.

Normally, I can consume 1-2 servings for my breakfast in the morning and be totally sated until lunchtime.

Today, however, I had a major hypoglycemic crash an hour before my lunch break. This of course left me exhausted again. Today also started the hot and cold flashes. Every half hour I was either putting my sweater on or taking it off. The hot flashes were so intense that my face felt like I was having a niacin flush.
I ate lunch, which again consisted of a piece of chicken and a waffle. I then experienced a second hypoglycemic crash within an hour and a half. This was preceded by a sudden bout of dizziness which left me holding onto my desk for dear life and wondering if I was going to pass out. Add to this hell a nice steady pain from my right elbow to my wrist because joint pain just HAD to factor in with me using a mouse all day at work (I’m right-handed).

So today when I got home from work, I slipped into my pajamas right away. I’m in official downtime. I have no idea if george will be here tonight, tomorrow, or Thursday, but I know he’ll be here before his scheduled Friday visit.

George once again ruins plans for me. I wish I could go back and prove how many times george has ruined plans for me. I’ve only been keeping an iCal for about a year, now. Hmmm, let’s see…

• Housewarming party, July 19, 2006. George shows up.
• Pat Benetar in concert, my friend’s birthday party, my birthday weekend, and Alameda House tour. Weekend of September 15, 2006. George shows up.
• A friend’s birthday party, October 14, 2006. George is there.
• A friend’s going away party, January 27, 2007. George had gone AND CAME BACK to kill me.
• Two weeks post-op for surgery diagnosing me with Endo - February 20, 2007. I’m told I should experience relief from george. He shows up and kills me just to spite me.
• On April 4, 2007, I got off the hormone treatment because it made me suicidal. Guess who showed up the next day and resumed the death squad like normal?
• The True Colors tour is this Friday. Guess who is due that day? I’m already ready to cry over that.

The george cravings hit me about ten days ago, and I’ve been gorging on chocolate and cheese-popcorn ever since, along with the usual cherry soy ice cream.

Yesterday, when I was out with my boyfriend shopping, the fatigue slammed down on me. We’d gone to about eight places. It was a struggle to get through the last four - I was just SO tired.

On the way home, I realised we still had a party to go to as well. I groaned. When we got home, it was 8pm and I took a nap for exactly one hour. Got up, threw myself together, and we went over to the party.

It appeared to be a housewarming/birthday, although the hostess had told us not to bring anything, so we didn’t. I mean, I’m beyond broke right now to begin with. I’m negative in the bank account with overdraft charges accumulating.

It was nice to see a bunch of people in person that I see often online, although I was feeling the usual social anxiety, so I began drinking. That’s how it goes with me. I got a nice buzz going but did not get drunk, so I’m proud of myself for that, but let me tell you, the social anxiety was pretty harsh for me last night. There were three obvious instances where as I was talking, people gave a look to another person with raised eyebrows like they had no idea what planet I was from, and then within thirty seconds, they walked away. It’s only with these few people that this always happens, too, which is why I’ve refused to get closer to these people.
This in turn makes me turn more towards a hermit, and I’ll end up not going out for longer and longer stretches of time. I could just go out and get additional friends to hang with, but as I get older, I find that it’s not really necessary. I actually prefer being a hermit. It’s also scary, because that’s the route my mom took, and I’d rather not turn into my mom.

Anyway, back to george. I felt kinda crampy last night at the party, and then even more crampy this morning. Now I’m waiting for george to just show up. He’s due tomorrow but it feels like he’ll be here today.

And then there’s the diet/george thing combined. Since I’ve been having massive food cravings, I’ve been eating a lot of sugary and caffinated foods. This in turn has led me to be moody, and has also contributed to the myriad hypoglycemic attacks I’ve been having for about a week, now.

On Thursday, the PMS was so bad that I caved in and had four Bagel Bites. They were left in the freezer from a party last month. I knew that this food contained yeast and wheat, but I was so thoroughly sick of chicken and eggs as my main staples, that I snapped and went for truly forbidden foods.
I did not appear to have a reaction to these four Bagel Bites! I couldn’t believe it.

So the next morning, as I rushed to get ready for my last day at work, I was still sick and tired of eggs for breakfast every day that I reached again for the Bagel Bites. I had five this time. I was already starting to sugar crash before I ate them, because I’d taken so long to eat on account of indecision that morning.
But within an hour of consuming the Bagel Bites, I got a migraine and my head felt swimmy like I was buzzed on alcohol, and it was difficult to see and concentrate, and I felt like I was starving again.
I took some ibuprofen and chugged water to try and counteract the insulin reaction. I didn’t feel better until I had lunch. I had Tilapia and yams that I’d made that morning, and that helped me immensely.

There’s good news and bad news in this story. The good news is that I didn’t have a reaction to the yeast in the Bagel Bites. That would have been a GI reaction. I only had the hypoglycemic attack, which is a wheat reaction. So my threshold for yeast remains greater than for that of wheat… sorta.
I mean, I don’t have the GI reaction on low amounts of yeast, but I still have the candida rash on my chest. So there’s that issue.

The end result is that I still have to cut sugar (and yeast is part of that) from my diet once again, and I really do have to keep avoiding wheat.

I’ve not lost any further weight after reintroducing sugar into my diet, so I’m hoping for additional weight loss once I remove sugar again.

When I will remove sugar again…that is the big question. I was supposed to do this last month. I’m eating soy ice cream as I type. Hmmm. How about… starting this Thursday, I will cut out all sugar. Yes, I can do this.

I’m coming up on my second menstrual cycle since going on the yeast-free diet, and starting Wednesday night, I began getting olfactory hallucinations of pizza just before bedtime. The scent was really strong, as though I’d just had pizza delivered.
I whimpered, of course.

A few days prior to that, I had a dream that I was making coffee in the morning, and I accidentally stirred in sugar and cream. I realised after the fact that I’d added verboten ingredients to it, and I remember saying “oh shit!” in the dream, staring down at the coffee, and then thinking, “well, I’d better drink it…don’t want to waste it”, and so I took a sip and it tasted SO good!!
I woke from that dream and whined. I’ve not had any coffee at all since going on this diet, because coffee itself is verboten. Previous to the diet, I couldn’t drink coffee first thing in the morning because it would lead to instant hypoglycemic attack. So dreaming of a morning ritual that includes making coffee is highly suspect.

This tells me that I’ve eaten something in the past week which has started to stir the little yeasty critters in my gut back to life again, and they’re trying to control my brain!!!

But what was it? I’m not keeping a food diary like a good girl. I should start doing that. Blah. I wonder if it was because I’d had the wheat cereal on the morning of May 19, and oatmeal on the morning of May 23rd? I remember those two dates because I’d noted hypoglycemic attacks in a monthly endo symptoms log that I keep, and I’d noted what brought those attacks on.

Anyway, PMS cravings won out and on Thursday, my boyfriend and I ordered Chinese food. My tummy was gurgly afterwards because of the soy sauce they use in the cooking, but it was soo good!

Today, I ate a sugar-free lifesaver candy, and it was so sweet from the sucralose that my eyes crossed, but it did the trick - it gave me the sugar fix I needed.

So, another month, another bout of food cravings, another month of nearly losing it emotionally, what’s new?
Same shit, different diet.

I guess it would help if I could remember to take my vitamins every day, too.

Oh, and on the drinking front…I went 26 days without a drop of alcohol. Then I had one small vodka on the rocks on May 20th. Then I went six days without drinking, before I had another small vodka on the rocks, and perhaps 1/4 glass of a mandarin vodka on the rocks after that, both on May 26th. I was at concerts on both occasions in which I drank liquor, which means I still get stressed out over being in social situations, and I still resort to alcohol to help chill me out.
BUT! And this is important - I haven’t gotten DRUNK to cope with social anxiety since going on this diet. Ha! It only took me 16 years to learn how to drink. :p

Oh, and you may ask ‘why vodka?’
I dunno. I thought it was ‘clean’? Not so much yeast? But I guess it’s made from potatoes, right? So I should really be going for rum or something, I dunno. I’m too lazy to research it right now.