I’m still waiting for my results. I realised only this morning that actually my nutritionist was away with a group of people from work. I may find out tomorrow.
What was interesting about this discovery was the fact that it underlined something I have discovered in myself of late - my propensity to paranoia. I have talked about this before, I don’t doubt, but my experiences on a course the other day brought it to the fore. More
I see things in a preternaturally logical way, perhaps, and I’m freely prepared to acknowledge that it may be my autistic traits that leave me so incredulous on observing others’ logical slips, but when the government announces on one day a plan to fluoridate water across the country, and goes on to denounce bottled water the next week, even such an advanced state of cynicism as my own is not sufficient to hold me back. Chemicals in food affect me to an extent I barely could have guessed just a few years ago when I was diagnosed, mistakenly it now seems, with Cyclothymia (manic depression lite). A few penny sweets see me throwing my mobile phone against walls in busy-brained exasperation, cheese and dairy, coffee, alcohol or gluten see my head fill with abstract anger and intrusive daydreams of, say, storming out of work and thieving my boss’s car to drive to the continent posting back vituperative postcards. Only recently have I started putting the pieces together (the telegrammatic version would see it described something like this: profligate use of antibiotics by doctors, and prophylactic use of same in the meat industry, fast baked bread with high levels of yeast and high-gluten strains of wheat plus a diet of refined carbohydrates leads to an imblance in gut flora and a leaky gut, which itself leads to improperly digested peptides intefering with brain function, casomorphin from milk protein being one such), consequently it is only recently that I have started to repair the damage with anti-fungals and probiotics, as a result of which my “ADHD” mind is clearer than it has been for years and my Aspergic traits less rainman than light intermittent drizzle. For this to happen, though, I have had to assiduously exclude from my diet practically anything which is not natural (excepting those supplements which would be unnecessary had I grown up on a more natural diet, but which address some of the problems caused by processed food). In my work with autistic and hyperactive students whose problems in so many respects echo my own, I see again and again that they, as I did, proactively, though unconsciously, seek those very substances which cause them problems just as heroin addict would seek a fix. Quite aside from restricting their diets to the substances such as gluten, dairy and orange which have most often been shown to correlate with symptoms in the opioid-excess theory of autism propounded by, for example,
I have been reintroducing vodka over the last couple of days. I have been trying to race through the reintroductions and get through the confirmation reintroductions. Of course, I had to pick up M_____ last night at 22:30 and so I had to start drinking fairly late. I dispatched M_____ fairly early what with a display of pretty outright negligence - she has been feeling more and more of late that I have been giving her little attention, and that she is not intelligent enough for me, and my reveries have only been confirming this view of things - she got back and I was irritated by her complaints about people and practices at work. With things so unsteady in my own life, I find I have little time for her problems, and little patience. I told her at one point to stop complaining, and she went to bed soon after that. More
I was getting increasingly stressed and had the feeling I wasn’t coping at all in the weeks before I saw a dietician for the first time on the 6th of August. I was going in to work telling myself I must see the nurse, even making notes to self in my phone to do so and not getting round to it. I was having reveries of telling my boss to fuck off and stick his job and they seemed to be becoming increasingly regular or increasingly intrusive. I was angry all the time, and increasingly aware that I wasn’t taken seriously at work nor respected, and that things weren’t going so well outside of work. We had moved house, and I was doing all the cooking and trying to wort a few things out, buy things for the place and kit it out, and I wasn’t having time for writing at all. I was snappy and didn’t want to be around people.
It was a terrible bloody day. I had been keeping a food diary for a couple of weeks, on paper, because we haven’t had the internet installed yet and my dietician would need a paper copy which I wouldn’t have got round to if I had first written it down on paper or onto my blog, and I had been counting up the days I hadn’t drank any alcohol, nor caffeine, and so on. Doing so made it very clear how important these things are for me, not drinking caffeine, and avoiding alcohol. I had slipped a couple of times with caffeine, and once with alcohol, having a pint at lunchtime at work with some people I rarely see, and both times it had really knocked me about for a couple of days. Suffice to say I hadn’t really drank much alcohol for a good few weeks, just a pint or a half here and there. And then we had a barbecue. It was my turn to be host - and it must be said that as anti-social as I am, I enjoy being a host, not exactly being the centre of attention but kind of setting the pace and keeping myself busy, especially with a barbecue. Predictably, I didn’t manage to stay off the alcohol, and convinced myself, once again, that vodka would be ok. In a way it was for a good while, until once everyone had gone (at least, I think I lasted that long) and it really all hit me at once.
M____’s mum was over. It was a barbecue for her, but also a housewarming. Only her Polish friends hadn’t come over, letting her down despite knowing a month in advance that her mum would be over.
In any case, the next day I had the worst possible hangover, and was barely able to move. I did little but look at page3.com and drive my boss about a couple of times all day. Except that lunchtime dietician’s appointment.
I turned up in the carpark, my car smelling of partly composted grass from the load of bags full of the stuff I had offered to take to the tip, and worried that I recognised the car in the corner as belonging to one of the women at work who I’ve had a few reveries about and had bitched about that day as being both condescending and hypersensitive - she, after all, has a number of food intolerances. It was one of these complexes with several anonymous buildings fenced off and notes on doors saying to use other door, door round corner etc.
I finally found the place and sat down trying to hold back the reveries about seeing supercilious medicos and finding they don’t listen at all, getting angry and walking out and the like. I picked Bleak House out of my bag but of course couldn’t read more than a sentence or two.
Finally, she called me through.
She listened. I introduced myself and said that, though I have not been diagnosed, I consider that I satisfy all the diagnostic criteria of both ADD and Asperger’s syndrome. And she agreed with me that my psychiatrist is wrong to say that if I was ADD I would have been diagnosed at school.
I found I was talking quickly, just like I always do sat in front of my shrink.
She then talked me through an exclusion diet. I would be excluding a lot of things of course to confirm first of all that food affects my symptoms. It would be a restricted diet that could not in any way be recommended as a permanent solution. Following this, foods would be reintroduced one after another for a three day period in order to check whether they triggered any symptoms. If they did they would be rechecked after all the others had been checked or eliminated.
In addition to being gluten free and dairy free, I would not be allowed onions, potatoes, beans and pulses, nuts and corn.
I wondered about a couple of things. First of all the fact that I would be allowed any quantity of any kind of fresh fruit seemed to exclude this being a diet which could check for candida. Secondly, I had read that there are food families, and that should, say, potato be excluded then aubergine should as well.
Nonetheless, it seemed a positive thing. I would have a structured diet, and an incentive to follow it for a set period of time. I hoped, and I hope, that this will help me to better conform to those aspect of the diet that I was already trying, mainly unsuccessfully, to follow, and to those additional aspects of it.
Thus far I have not began the diet. I have indeed conformed to the no alcohol, no caffeine, no gluten nor dairy part of the deal, but in using up some old frozen meals and making a couple of things I had bought ingredients for, and indeed in conforming to this part of the diet to a fuller extent in transition to the exclusion diet, but have figured that I need a little more preparation yet to make the full switch.
Over the last few days, on my own in the new house with M____ flying back to Poland with her Mum, I have worried that though diet is a large contributory factor to my problems, however well I eat it will be no panacea. I have been eating pretty well, with perhaps medium-high GI dishes (lovely vegetable curries with gram flour pancakes, for example) but still finding that I’m having pretty intrusive and often angry reveries. More than once I have needed to go and do some vigorous exercise, some shadow boxing and the like to try and get it out of my system. In fact today or yesterday I started to worry, comparing myself to J D Salinger who I have always believed to have a temperament very similar to my own (granted every adolescent believes this, but I do tend to feel that carefull exegesis of certain passages in Catcher and elsewhere in his oevre demonstrates a tendency towards ADD and perhaps Asperger’s to a degree little less than the evidence Kay Redfield Jamison amasses in Touched with Fire demonstrates the bipolarity of the personalities she discusses). Salinger is of course a famous recluse, and in articles I will soon post elsewhere, I will discuss my own tendencies in this regard. He also is prone, according to some reports, to be attracted to many and varied methods of healing, many of which it is safe to say, have not been submitted to peer review. I have always been subject to crises of confidence regarding my diets, mainly perhaps due to the blank faces, scepticism and suspicion I meet when I describe my problems those few times I trust people enough to bother to do so at all, and this was one such.
Still, it is fantastic to have somebody simply listen.
On leaving, she even told me about a friend of hers who has been diagnosed as Aspergic in his late thirties. This guy had been very academic, getting a clutch of A-levels and the like and going into computers. Only his employers referred him to a counsellor for problems he was having at work. Bingo.
We chatted for a little while in fact before I left. All in all it was a good day. M____ rang to ask how it had went. I thnk she was glad finally to hear something positive, that something had gone well.
So, fingers crossed!
I am feeling furious and unfulfilled.
All day I have been absolutely exhausted. I got up late having eaten Weetabix last night and slept very shallowly. I have been feeling completely exhausted, like I do sometimes, with a heavy, tingly tiredness in my legs that feels like I have run a marathon. I get this sometimes. A feeling completely disproportionate to the amount of exercise I have been doing.
I have been able to do nothing since I got back from work. I read a little, but barely a chapter or so, and managed to write no more than a paragraph. I am angry with the amount of time I get for writing. I can’t deal with it. And now for the last hour or so I have been on the computer, writing a little of my blog, which is still consigned to Bebo. I have been trying to rectify that, by looking into why on earth a second domain has disappeared on my host, but I am completely lost in the system, unable to make head nor tale of the control panel system, and getting lost with submitted requests for help having disappeared in the system now irretrievable, and unanswered. I cannot install Wordpress on the second domain I hope to put my blog on with some drafts of short stories and the like. I have forgotten my password to one of the log-ins and it is none of my normal ones. That or it doesn’t tally with the log-in name I am using perhaps in error. This kind of problem should be easily rectified in the system but it isn’t.
Anyway, the main thing to report is my absolute bloody tiredness. I’m fed up with it.
Morning: green tea and Weetabix again, because I got up so late, having left my mobile phone downstairs last night (in part I think I wanted to do some writing,Ă‚Â though I can’t remember what I was doing, but then I got tied into some porn because I had been having many many sexual fantasies and thought it would contribute to my not sleeping. I was up for another half hour or so then finding porn and looking again for ADDerall.)
So, yes, my morale is pretty low and I know I will find little time for cooking. My priorities have cycled round again. I come back home to play guitar, and to write. And I am still dreading moving into this house. I Am feeling like I need complete freedom from everything right now. I need shot of all responsibilities.
I can’t believe I forgot to post on this. I had to rush off straight afterwards to go to our Spanish class - the first we have attended for a month or so.
Dad had been phoning around trying to find a nutritionist for me. He is good at phoning around and I’m not, and I have been speaking of it for months and not getting round to it. And so after I threatened to take time off work to write, and said I needed to get my food problem sorted, he said he would ring around. I left a note about what he should look into, ADD and casein/gluten intolerance.
He rang around. There are no dieticians in the area who know anything about it. He continued to ring around, finding then a gastrologist in a hospital in Dudley. I was sceptical, but he assured me that he had asked the secretary about what I had written down and that yes, he knows about that. I would need to see my doctor and ask for a referral.
Come the day and I consulted the nurse at work, asking how to get a referral, because it had been like hitting my head up against a brick wall. It should be ok, but yes, she said, I was right to continue to be sceptical, and I should ring the doctor my father had come across and check that it is the right thing for me because if not they might be more difficult next time in referring me.
I came back, nervous. I tend not to think much about things that are being done for me, but now it was upon me. I was seriously doubtful. Dad remembered the number to Dudley hospital. I rang and got through to the secretary. No, he doesn’t know about that, I think you would need a dietician wouldn’t you. He does biopsies and Celiac disease, but, no.. I was angry. I stomped about saying I would have nothing to say to the doctor. I worried how he would take me. It would be the third or fourth time I had gone about the same thing, and they have been off hand or unhelpful every time. The only difference was this time I was seeing a different doctor. Before now I had seen one doctor who is the most supercilious bastard I’ve ever met, a new doctor who rang through to this doctor I’d be seeing, and also his wife. He had always been my preferred doctor, but he had been ill for a long time, and, because he is probably everybody’s preferred doctor he is always more difficult to get an appointment for.
I drove down, waiting restlessly in the waiting room, reading the beginning of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and parts of the New Scientist, worrying about what I would say to him, and what he would say. Genuinely anxious, almost shaky. Doctors have affected my mood so many times before so negatively.
I got it together and went in. He said hello, cheerily! Sorry, but this fact alone is worthy of an exclamation mark since it is a fact that NHS GPs are so in need of training in dealing with people: they have no communication skills, or perhaps, rather, are quite unprepared to use those they have for ordinary people. He apologised and said he would have to read a couple of letters on his computer. He did so and then, looking at me(!), asked was the problem.
I explained.
He asked if I had kept a food diary. I had. He asked several questions. I talked about having had a couple of slips recently, how I had felt having drank the vodka the other Sunday, and the Ginsters the other day. He flickled through the A5 notebook I have kept a food diary in since 20th May, 2006. I made a few disclaimers. I said I found it hard to do anything consistently. He asked what I experienced with convenience foods, foods I didn’t prepare from scratch. I said I would be going back too long to remember. So, he said, when it says re-heated chile con carne that’s one you made and re-heated. yes, I said. He asked a couple more questions and said he would refer me.
I think that one of the letters was a letter from a shrink I’m seeing. He had asked for a referral for me. I wasn’t sure what was happening with it. I’d seen him since he sent the letter and heard nothing. The Doc explained, saying that it hadn’t been addressed to him.
He said he wasn’t sure whether the dietician would have experience with mood and behaviour but that he would put that in the letter. I said I was prepared to travel. He said the NHS being what it is it would be a question of where they refer me to.
I thanked him, and meant it.
I went out and drove home and had some dinner, before going to Spanish and having a good time for once, acting out a conversation in a silly voice and making everyone laugh.
It’s only later that I realised how inconvenient for my blog it was, what with this doctor being so nice and all, but maybe the dietician will deny that there is a problem, or claim it is psychosomatic, or say I need only avoid MSG and Aspartamain[]!
We’ll see.
