Food allergies can suck a bag of things I’m not allergic to

Here’s a pretty picture of yarn. The rest of this post will be me bitching about my food allergies. Feel free to just look at the pretty yarn and then move on about your day.

One of the reasons (possibly) that I’ve been in a CrankPot mood this last week or two, and not had a lot to say, is that I’ve been fighting off not only a lot of aches and pains (migraines and Plantar fasciitis) but about every other, or every three days, I’m having a food allergy reaction. Not to something I’m definitely allergic to – I’m not so much a dumbass that I’m going to deliberately sit down to a plate of chicken and get halfway into eating it before I remember D’oh! I’m allergic to chicken!. But reactions to food I’m not allergic to but that has apparently been cross-contaminated with food I am allergic to.

I was complaining to my chiropractor yesterday morning that it seems like if anything in my body has ever before been broken or stretched out of alignment, it hurts right now. He was asking me about other things in my life, like stress (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA) and then we started talking about how, in the last couple weeks, my body has been out of control with allergy symptoms – like the other night, when Tim made pork chops, and I reacted to them just as hard as if I’d eaten a plate of chicken. I do not want to be allergic to pork! Do you know what being allergic to pork would mean? IT WOULD MEAN BEING ALLERGIC TO BACON. The only thing worse than that would be if I were to develop a sudden allergy to cheese. Life would be not worth living!

So anyway. I’ve been popping Benadryl like little pink candies and grinding my teeth a lot.

Oh! Right! The chiropractor. Well, he’s very whole-body and his hypothesis is that when one thing is the matter, your body can be in such distress about that, that other things can be more of a problem than they usually are. And that feeds on itself. His advice is to go vegetarian for the rest of the week, and give my body a little chance to recover from the food allergies. (As an aside, we are now looking for a grocery store with a more allergen-free meat-cutting facility; the last few weeks that we’ve gotten hamburger and pork from Publix, I’ve had a reaction as if it’s cross-contaminated with chicken or turkey*). I am to drink twice as much water as I usually drink, drink more water than I eat food, and most of that food should be fruit. At the same time I’m to do foot and shoulder stretches, and he gave me this crazy Thera-Band thing for hand stretches, and the hope is that between all of those things I will find a little relief from either pain or food allergies. Getting relief from one will free up resources in my body to fight the other.

And if not? We need to buy a bigger house so that we can have two kitchens, so that I can go vegan.

* I suspect I’m not the only one having problems — I noticed about a week ago a sudden sign above the Publix butcher/custom-cut area that they have a new allergy warning sign stating that fish, fowl, and meat are all processed there and that those allergic to any one of those things (or in my case, two of the three) should take that into account.