Pancakes to Celebrate 2009

I wanted to make a special New Year's Eve dinner tonight. So I made buckwheat with shredded apple pancakes and chicken apple breakfast sausage. I only ate 2 pancakes, 1-1/2 sausage with about 1/4 cup of real maple syrup and Earth Balance dairy/soy free margarine. However, I was thoroughly satisfied (and full). That was a perfect year end dinner to celebrate a year of legalizing (making peace with?) all nonallergenic foods.

Years ago I would fear that pancakes with syrup would disrupt my blood sugar so much that I would binge the rest of the night. I so feared any sweet foods that I either binged on them or adamantly avoided them. 5 years ago I learned that I was allergic to pancake ingredients (wheat, milk, egg, cane sugar), but the maple syrup was perfectly safe for me. However, I still needed several years to completely 'legalize' all foods to which I didn't have diagnosed allergies, like the buckwheat pancakes made from allergy free ingredients, which I ate tonight.

2009 was a year of unbelievable changes for me. First of all, I went from bingeing and throwing up an average of once a month during 2008 to bingeing and purging once in January 2010, just eating and throwing up because I was sick with undiagnosed c-diff infection in late March, to not bingeing or throwing up for the rest of the year (over 9 months). Now bingeing seems as gross as purging ... no maybe worse. I did wake up with uncontrollable nausea and dry heaves on the first night I took flagyl for c-diff. However, I don't consider dry heaves from drug induced nausea 'purging'. Nevertheless, I controlled the nausea by drinking ginger tea during the next 3 weeks of flagyl treatment.

The next big change was 'regularity'. Before I contracted the c-diff bacteria (and still don't know how or where), I had chronic constipation unless I ate lots of fiber and took lots of magnesium. I only had relief from that irregularity when I took massive doses of probiotics after eradicating an intestinal bug. However, that 'relief' usually only lasted a month or 2, usually during Maui vacations. Ever since I began treating c-diff with first flagyl and then vancomycin, I've had lots of diarrhea, but sometimes normal regularity. Although c-diff is a dangerous and sometimes lethal bacteria with side effects of headache, nausea, cramping pain, passing mucous and, of course, diarrhea, that last side effect 'cured' my irregularity.

The c-diff infection was the most dangerous and prolonged change. I've previously blogged about how my naturopath initially discounted my symptoms until I insisted on a stool test. Then he treated an infection I'd already had for over 2 months with a 'mild infection' drug, flagyl, which made me sicker than the c-diff infection. When c-diff symptoms returned (because flagyl really wasn't strong enough), he gave me another flagyl 10 day treatment prescription. I didn't finish that prescription, because I was sooo sick from both flagyl and c-diff symptoms. Then he told me to take a 3 day treatment break before starting vancomycin. I later learned that 3 day break allowed the c-diff spores to morph into even higher levels of bacteria.

However my doc only gave me a week's worth of vanco, when the usual treatment was for 10 days. So I should have expected that I would get another recurrence of c-diff. Then I asked for a 2 week treatment dose, but before I finished that dose I discovered online the most successful treatment regimen for recurrent c-diff (tapered and pulse dosing). Unfortunately I didn't do the pulse dose long enough and got another (6th) c-diff recurrence while on vacation in Maui.

After jumping through many medical bureaucratic hoops, we were finally able to get a month's (full dose) prescription for vanco. I took that 4x daily for 17 days, then tapered to 2x a day for a week, once a day for a week, once every other day for 8 days, once every 3rd day for 2 weeks and then once every 4, 5th and sometimes 6th day for awhile. About that time I read about taking stronger doses every 4-6 days. So when I reexperienced some c-diff symptoms I took a stronger dose. That approach worked twice to relieve the symptoms. Then I returned to one vanco every 3, 4 or 5 days.

Thereafter I didn't notice any 'recurrence' symptoms. So I took my last vanco last Sunday (5 days ago). Tomorrow I will go off all meds, digestive enzymes and probiotics for 3-4days before taking another stool test to determine whether I'm finally free of c-diff. I struggled with c-diff for over 9 months, like pregnancy. I wonder what that 9 month struggle did for me, besides resolve my irregularity problems?? I'll consider that in another post. This post is already too long.