Tuesday, August 24, 2010

T-minus 7 days and counting

Well the last few days have been quite full of interesting things.... here's a taste: new pump drama, moving, packing, food intolerance (IgG) testing, bad food reactions and my last day of work.



So an update about the new pump saga. I have sent in my request form to the people at Minimed and they have confirmed that they have received it and will send my pump 2 day air or faster to make sure that i receive it before I leave. That should be good right? Well it will be once they receive the Rx from my dr in Denver. Normally the Barbra Davis Center is super efficient and when I call Regina (the secretary of power who gets stuff done!) directly, normally I don't even worry about it. But there has been no RX to be seen. I called her again today and she said it should have gone out on Friday when they got my fax. She's currently calling the Pump/CGM department to see what happened or where something went wrong. She's great. Let's all hold hands and hope that everything works itself out today.

My morning was occupied by many, many phone calls because of an particularly interesting set of reactions I experienced this weekend with both goat's milk yogurt and honeydew melon. I know, I know, that sounds quite odd and a weird pairing but have no fear! I did not have them at the same time, but rather the combined efforts of the casein or SOMETHING in the two of them reaked havoc on my brain and body.
Let me start with this, the past few weeks I have been eating very small amounts of milk in sweet, delicious and snackable type foods. Aka M&M's and Snicker's bar. hahaha. I also had had some butter and a GF pancake mix with Buttermilk in it last weekend while I was at the beach with my family. I didn't seem to be reacting to anything and I was getting really excited. About half-way through the week I started to notice that I was feeling a bit spacey and forgetful and like I do when I eat gluten. I figured I went over my body's daily tolerance of milk products and it was affecting my thinking like gluten does. I decided to tone it down and cut back on the milk again. (And then proceeded to the next night have frozen yogurt. haha oops?) But even that didn't seem to make me feel that bad, yes a bit more scatter brained and I got a small headache but it wasn't anything like what happened on Sunday.
I had a pretty normal sunday morning for me-get up, go get coffee and go to my weightwatcher's meeting and then the grocery store. I had gone to Sprouts and some goast's milk yogurt caught my eye and teased me into buying it. If I had an entire thing of frozen yogurt and been fine, a goat's milk yogurt should be okay on my stomach! Thought I. You see my logic here is that goats milk has less of the protein called casein in it that my EnteroLab results from last year said I was reacting to. Some people with Casein intolerances are able to have goats milk. So, I was testing this hypothesis as well.
I'm not one of those people.
Literally within several minutes from the first bite of yogurt, my stomach blew up like a balloon, I got a headache and I was not feeling like a happy camper. The reaction lasted about and hour and a half, and then grew milder and my headache went away. Curious. I had remembered when I first went dairy-free Katie Bode and I made enchiladas and we had used goat's milk cheese, playing off the same logic I had used this past weekend. Same thing happened. I got a really bad stomach ache really quickly. 2 out of 2 makes me think that this is not a viable option for me.
Then on monday morning at work I was starting to feel kind of light-headed and was having a hard time remembering anything or forming sentences without saying "uhnm" every other word. This problem makes you sound really articulate on the phone when you're at work... not. I had also gotten a fruit cup at the centrum and this cup has melon, honeydew, strawberries and watermelon. I have thought before that I might have a reaction to honeydew in particular and sometimes watermelon because often when I eat them I don't feel very good after. Tired, distracted and I get a stomach ache. It's happened babysitting, at home, at work and I often notice it with eating these fruit cups. I always thought it was cause they were cutting the fruit on cutting boards which had had bread or gluten products on it earlier and not cleaned. I'm now pretty sure its the melon.
These two circumstances have lead me back to where I was in january, and suspecting that I have more than just the gluten/casein intolerances. So I called up my Dr. and asked about a food intolerance panel they had offered to do on my first visit. (We had initially denied because we didn't think that I needed more testing and didn't want to pay for it). Yesterday afternoon I spent time on the phone getting the information on the tests from my Dr's office and the codes. I called insurance and they said they would cover that code but I have to have the test done at a lab they cover. This morning's calling showed that the labs which do these tests are NOT covered by my insurance and that there is no way for the lab to order the test and so get billed and then my insurance pays them. Its all very annoying. But long story short, my insurance won't cover it and so I have to go to my Dr and pay them all the upfront costs. *sigh* Oh well, I'm going to be tested for reactions to 95 different foods. I will be getting separate tests for goat's milk and honeydew.


Now for the normal stuff. I'm packing today the rest of my stuff and moving it from the room I'm in to all the rooms of the people who are holding stuff for me while I'm gone. I'm returning books, saying good-bye to people and also GOING SALSA DANCING! I'm so excited! This is the last big hurrah before I leave. Then a couple friends said they'd get up early and take me to the airport at like 5:30am so that I can be there by 7 for my flight at 9. I'll be home at noon, Diabetes dr app at 2 and then hopefully dinner with Katie.

Thats about it for now. (lol that wasn't a short post, was it?)
HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY KELLY!!

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