ChiKat

Eliminating sugar from my diet was successful, but I was still not 100%. Maybe I’ll never be 100%, but I was encouraged by the diet results and decided to look into food allergies more. There are two ways to identify food allergies. You can go on a fast, flush your system of everything, and then introduce one new food per week and see if you react to it. Or you can have a blood test done.

The pros to the fasting: it’s free.
The cons to fasting: it’s long, tedious, prone to error and hard. Ugh.

My attention span could never handle the one food per week cycle. I looked into the blood tests. My doctor didn’t think the tests were "real medical tests," my insurance company certainly wasn’t going to pay for them, and even my husband, who is a scientist, was a little wary of them.

But I decided to pony up the $300 and order a test myself. I’m not even going to link to the company, because I really don’t know if this is crap science or a valid test. I’d hate for someone to waste their money on a test I recommended if the test turns out to be crap.

I told my husband I could probably handle being allergic to wheat, as long as I could keep eating cheese. Ha! Why I had to open my mouth, I don’t know. I was fine with almost all foods, but I reacted practically off the chart for eggs and all dairy. Cow milk, goat milk, all cheeses, butter and any other vaguely dairy-related food you can think of.

Keep in mind that I while I do eat seafood, I hadn’t had any other meat since I was about 8 years old. It’s just not my think. As for seafood, I eat shrimp or fish maybe once a month. So I was pretty much a vegetarian already. Giving up eggs, butter and dairy would put me into the vegan category, and every vegan I knew was pale, pasty and way too thin. Plus they ate tofu, which I find disgusting.

The thing is, and it always comes back to this, I would rather be pale and pasty but able to walk, rather than a crippled little gnome. So I evicted all the dairy from our house (the support my husband has given me and all these diet changes is an entry in and of itself).

The verdict? It worked.

With the diet, the daily pain is very manageable. It’s been about six months now. I usually have one week of mild* pain and three weeks of no pain at all. It’s shocking to me. I wake up, hold my breath for a second, and then move. And there is no pain. I flex every joint, because surely it’s not possible that I have another pain free day. Those pain free days fill me with total joy. It’s overwhelming. How can I not be giddy with happiness on those days?

So here’s the dilemma. My food diet is hard. I hate not being about to eat like a normal person (or at least a normal vegetarian). I miss desserts. I miss cheese. I miss popcorn dripping in butter.

If I go back on Enbrel (after hopefully having a baby), I don’t have to worry about the food restrictions as much. I’ll still eat a hell of a lot less sugar and dairy than I did before, but when I do indulge, Enbrel will handle my flares.

But I’m hesitating before committing to Enbrel. RA is a disease of an over-active immune system. The biologics work by suppressing the immune system. There are two huge problems with this:
(1) More and more studies are coming out that say people on biologics have a higher risk of cancer. The studies aren’t sure of the RA is the cause, or the medication. Either way, it’s a huge red flag.
(2) Enbrel suppresses the immune system. I really believe that bird flu is coming. And even if it isn’t, there are a ton of scary things out there. I want my immune system at full-throttle, not suppressed. Unfortunately for me, when my immune system is at full-throttle, it is so gung-ho that it starts attacking my own joints. But suppressing it is a scary prospect. When I’m not on Enbrel, I never get sick. If my husband gets a cold that lasts two weeks, I will catch the cold from him and it will last 10 minutes. When I was on Enbrel I got shingles. What person my age gets shingles? A person with a suppressed immune system.

If I stay on my no-sugar, vegan diet, can I stay drug-free? During that week each month when I am in mild pain, what’s happening to my body? Enbrel stops joint damage. Am I avoiding weekly injections only to need joint replacement surgery down the line? That’s what I think about at night. When I am very still, I try to listen to my joints, I try to hear if anything is happening to them. I feel like there are tiny little trolls inside of me, mining away. With my diet, I took away their fuel. But some days, they seem to be hard at work despite all the diet changes I made.



* Pain tolerance is different for everyone. My pain tolerance is skewed by RA. For me, mild pain is not as bad as a broken bone. Mild pain is more like a sprain ankle. It hurts, but it’s not unbearable.