So in January I visited my new doctor. Not surprisingly, she spotted my extreme anemia and did the one thing that probably made me get serious about following through with a plan. Instead of prescribing iron to take twice a day and asking me to make a follow-up appointment with her in three months, she gave me a scrip to get blood work done in three-months time. Whe'd get the results then we'd talk on the phone about next steps. Brilliant!
So I religiously took my iron for three months. I research iron absorption, veg vs. non-veg sources of iron and how they get aborbed, when to take it, what to take it with, etc. I missed one dose in three months, took it first thing in the morning with orange juice (then waited an hour before eating breakfast), took it last thing before bed (shooting for at least 2 hours after eating anything.) After three months, I had my blood work done and spoke to Dr. Font on the phone. There had been a small improvement, so she recommended that I continue oral iron for three more months. I said okay. In May, I experienced a bout of GI distress so severe I stayed home from work for three days in a row. In all, the episode of unpleasantness lasted more than three weeks. I saw a nurse practicioner at my doctor's office, who ordered all kinds of blood and stool tests (oh, joy!). The tests revealed two things: 1) My anemia had actually gotten a little worse, and 2) there was no apparent reason for my diarrhea. Dr. Font and I spoke over the phone again. She recommended that I see a hematologist for follow-up for the anemia. Enter the amazing Dr. Hartner. More in part 3. So as I cracked open the fourth egg in my little baking project yesterday, I admitted that i can't really call myself a vegan any more. I became a vegan for health reasons, though I could also get behind the ethical reasons also. And maybe I'll return to veganism again. For now though, while I figure out how to handle the GF diet, I'm conceding that eggs are part of my story for now.
So back to the eggs. I decided that the tapioca bread I took on the mini-vacation just wasn't good enough to continue to pretend to be bread. Plus, it has no fiber or any other redeeming nutritional value. I suspect that it instantly turns to sugar after being chewed. So what else was there to do but throw a bunch of sugar and eggs and vanilla soy milk on it, bake it, and call it bread pudding? What else SHOULD you do with bread made out of tapioca? So, the end result was okay. I'd be very dissapointed if I ordered it in a restaurant -- too sweet -- so next time (and knowing my sweet tooth, there WILL be a next time) I'll cut the sugar or use regular almond milk. So we are just back from a vacation to the middle of the state to an old fashioned amusement park. We stayed at a bed and breakfast. I packed in enough food to make sure that I would have SOMETHING to eat if nothing else materialized. there were some rough patches, which were mostly rough because I'd get my mind wrapped around how I thought it would go, and then it wouldn't go the way I predicted. So I'm learning to roll with the celiac punches.
Dining highlights: Breakfasts were okay, with eggs and homefries, after checking in with the nice lady about any secret gluteny ingredients. Lunches: One was a salad with salsa that I packed in, the other was a baked potato with salsa from the food court at the park. Dinners were tougher -- hummus and chips with a pb&j on the vile tapioca bread sustained me. I also had apples, raisins and GF tortilla chips around for snacks. We had an outing to a Denny's on our way home. I had read in the book my boss gave me, Real Life with Celiac Disease, that Denny's has a GF menu. Reality? Not so much a GF menu, but a piece of paper that lists random possible allergens in their foods. Not terribly helpful. The waitress was great though, and checked on a couple of things for me (including the contents of their salsa by tearing the ingredient list off the case and bringing it out to show me -- it had "smoke flavor" which I was suspicious about, so I passed on it). I ended up getting a large garden salad (listed as a side dish, but the waitress got them to make it really big for me, and I used my own salsa -- helpful that we had a cooler in the car with our travel provisions. [My salsa was the Archer Farms Black Bean and Corn variety from Target. I had called Target the day before to confirm it's GF status.] So, I had a pretty good dinner, only got charged $1.99, and made my first successful venture to a restaurant declaring my need for GF food. I'd call that a success. [Author's note: I may have to change my status from Vegan to One Who Doesn't Eat Very Much Dairy or Eggs...] |
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