Mouth sores opening up

For the first time I have noticed the sores on my mouth opening up as it happens. I first noticed yesterday the tingling, almost burning sensation in the corners of my mouth that comes with eating fruit and/or acidic juicy foods when these sores (or rather, perhaps, the slightly broken skin) are opening up. Yesterday it was not yet complete, but today it has certainly worsened. Catching it as it occurs allows me, to some degree, to look at what I have been eating and to try and track back anything that has changed that might have led to these sores, which I am told, indicate vitamin B deficiency. More

Peel me off this velcro seat

There’s been so much I haven’t related about my struggles with food of late. I’ve been coming to resent my blogs more and more, and let’s be honest, the division between yeswehavenobananas and masterkidderminster was always more of an ADD whim than a reasoned division, something that has allowed a lot of the food-related problems I have to run into the broader diaries in Unforgiving Minutes and the like. Quite aside from the blogs, I have come to resent too, more and more, the role that food plays in my life and the amount of energy it takes to try to cook the food I need to stay as well as I can be. When I am not moving forward with my cooking, I resent it, and since I am such a perfectionist and since I am limited in my choice of ingredients and condiments, my cooking abilities often depress me more than they console me (and all cooking should be consoling). The fact, too, that no matter how hard I try, my efforts don’t bring me any closer to [long reveries, confrontations with the boss on the subject of being articulate, or not, being the last of a long series] being healthy, and coping, whilst every single slip counts immediately. [further morning meeting reveries involving berating my colleagues for a lack of willingness]. More

Crunch time

I’m angry, restless, irritable. I picked up M____ in the car some time back and driving there I was thinking the end has to come soon. I have been so aware of being around her unable to think of anything to say, and today cleaning my room and counting down the time until I would have to pick her up I was so angry at the time I am wasting to her being around. Driving back too, she told me it would be a hard week because I would have to drop her off most mornings, including tomorrow, though she normally lets me off weekends (she is ill), and I thought about how that means that she won’t be working in the evenings and I will feel compelled to be with her, saying nothing and aware of my own failings, and that I will be unable to get down to anything productive.

Maybe it’s the Capryllic acid I’m taking at the moment. Maybe its ‘die off reactions’ but I feel awful, and can’t cope with this. I need my life back. This relationship is giving me so little compares to what it seems to take away. I have nothing to say to M____ and all I’m doing is forcing myself to be sociable so much. I can’t deal with it. I don’t want to let her down, but it shouldn’t be such a big deal. It’s only because she can’t cope on her own that I feel so guilty about thinking this.

But it’s late, and I have to be up in the morning!

Black day

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

down the woods

Any disruption from the normal routine is still difficult for me as far as the diet is concerned, and recently I’ve been going down the Woods a few times.

More

The Potato Blight

Actually I am being very facetious with my title. As my last post made clear, it cannot be certain what is causing my current malaise. What is clear is that I can’t concentrate, and that I am having a lot of reveries sat in front of a piece of paper trying to write a continuation of Nat’s story. My legs are restless too and I’m very antsy. 

As far as reveries go, I have been having discussions with students about being sexist, telling them (within earshot of certain people, as usual), that they will miss out on a hell of a lot in life if they exclude women, that yes (launching into one of my semi-manic comic monologues) women can take an utterly ordinary, insignificant event and turn it into a three or four hour conversation topic and do our heads in, but that on the flip side they can have far wider-ranging conversation; I have been cooking, filling in for the kitchen staff at work; I have been describing in one of the morning meetings a student’s problems with a subscription to an erotic website, jokily describing the website in such a way as makes clear my own familiarity with porn sites, but also arguing strongly that there should be no moral qualms about encouraging such a student to buy erotic magazines… And much more. 

Nothing remotely out of the ordinary, except that I could not simply shake my head and be rid of them. They were persistent and intrusive, which they have not been for a long while. 

There was not, as I wrote earlier, much potato in the curry I made. It was just hot. As far as testing goes it was really not ideal. Far too ambiguous. Perhaps I will have to stretch this one out beyond the few days I’ll be eating this curry. 

It is good though, after putting so much into the diet to see such a positive result, which presumeably will continue into tomorrow. I will have to watch too that it does, since it could be that today’s gym session was the problem. I shall have to watch out for the impact of demanding cardiovascular exercise on my symptoms. There may be some effect, and possibly a negative effect arising from the demand on the system made by toxins and the like. Mainly, though, I think there must be a problem with either starch or hot foods. (I did not in the end serve much rice at all with the curry either at lunch or dinner.) Nor did I eat more fruit than I have been on the diet. Indeed, less than most days with an apple after my millet porridge in the morning, and another after my dinner. 

Yes, these positive results will be a positive thing for me, I’m sure, after all the impatience with the constant demands of my time of my cooking and food shopping, even if I have to stick it all out a little longer. 

*** 

I should describe the reintroduction stage Here is the schedule: 

Tap Water       -  1-2 pints a day.Potatoes          -  Have 2 x 4oz portionsMilk                   -  1 pint a dayYeast                -  3 brewers yeast tablets or 2 teaspoons of fresh bakers yeast in water or fresh yeast spread on rice cakes. 

[Reverie of looking tired in a morning meeting and being told that I should go to bed earlier. Me responding that I did go to bed early, but that doesn’t much help when you don’t fall asleep until seven hours later. Describing my exclusion diet and how I had reintroduced yeast the night before, smashed up a cupboard, gone out for a walk and come upon some guys kicking a hedgehog around, and that I kicked hell out of them; then describing my condition and a similar situation to the girls in the kitchen; then, again, in a morning meeting.] 

Tea                    -  Drink at least 6 cups.Rye                    -  Test 5 Ryvita or 2 slices of Rye bread (check the bread is not a mixture of wheat and rye). Only test rye as bread if the yeast was negative.Beef                  -   2 x 3oz portions. 

[Popped to the toilet and to make some fruit tea. Reverie first of doing my usual rant against homeopathy, talking about water having not only to have a memory, but also be a discerning memory, to be essentially sentient [reverie about flow forms, something the people at work go mad about, and dismissing them, saying I can appreciate the beauty of water but rarely feel the need to verbalise it, etc etc., a whole other rant here] saying how is water supposed to diagnose the person it commes into contact with, and remember the specific molecules it was adjacent to at one point in its history, and discard all others, such as, for example, fish piss and, say, even homeopathic remedies for other individuals which have subsequently been passed out as urine and diluted several times in the water treatment works, something which should, if homeopathy’s logic is to be pursued, make it stronger… talking to the mother of one student I believe could be helped by a G/F C/F diet having shared my lunch with him for a couple of months (this because another student expressed an interest in my lunch today), describing to her the improvement in his condition. Oh, and the first, telling the managers at work that one of their light switches was arcing, being put down by one of them “yes, thank you, when we need you’re electrical advice we’ll ask for it” before challenging them…] 

Butter         -  Test at least 2oz during the day.Onions      -  Have 2 x 1oz portions.Eggs          -  Have 2 during the day.Oats           -  Test as porridge oats, have two servings.Coffee       -   Test coffee beans and instant coffee - have at least 6 cups.Chocolate -  Plain or cocoa.Barley        -  Can be tested as pearl barley, 2 x 2oz portions (cooked weight) or barley flakes.Citrus Fruit  - Have at least 2 fruits or 2 glasses of fruit juice.White Wine - Have two glasses.Corn             - Test cornflour or corn on the cob.Yoghurt        - Ordinary yoghurt made with cow’s milk, test 2 small cartons.Wheat          -  Test as 5 slices of bread if yeast is okay, or wheat breakfast cereals or pasta.Saccharin   -  Test as saccharin tablets.Shellfish     -  Have 2 x 2oz portions.Nuts            -   Any kind, have 2 x 1oz portions.Preservatives  - Try fruit squashes, tinned foods, sausages, smoked fish etc. 

I have a couple of reservations, including that white wine is a strange choice being as it contains both yeast and alcohol, and would like to reintroduce a few extra things, including, as of today, also spicy foods on their own, mushrooms, sugar and vodka. On the whole though, I am glad I can see the end of this thing in sight, and that I soon might come to a time when just excluding gluten and dairy, say, may seem like a doddle, and it will be much easier mentally because of the consistency that should come from having conducted an exclusion diet and narrowed things down. We’ll see.

03:36

Shallow sleep again. Constant mental flotsam and jetsam, from sexual fantasies to invidious snatches of songs heard throughout the day. For dinner I warmed up the very sharp remains of the curry I made on Friday with a little quinoa. I have read before that food that has been left out for a while becomes perfuse with yeast. Now this was left in the car over the weekend and then out yesterday on a sunny day. This is presumeably what comes of just warming something like that up. The curry was made with a coconut milk and tomato base, and I should try to avoid tomato on my exclusion diet, but I have never noticed a reaction before. (Whether I would have noticed such a reaction when not looking for one is a moot point, given as for a long time only a year or so ago I didn’t even write down cheese in my food diaries since I unconsciously regarded it as a neutral filler to keep hunger at bay!) More

03:36 am

Shallow sleep again. Constant mental flotsam and jetsam, from sexual fantasies to invidious snatches of songs heard throughout the day. For dinner I warmed up the very sharp remains of the curry I made on Friday with a little quinoa. I have read before that food that has been left out for a while becomes perfuse with yeast. Now this was left in the car over the weekend and then out yesterday on a sunny day. This is presumeably what comes of just warming something like that up. The curry was made with a coconut milk and tomato base, and I should try to avoid tomato on my exclusion diet, but I have never noticed a reaction before. (Whether I would have noticed such a reaction when not looking for one is a moot point, given as for a long time only a year or so ago I didn’t even write down cheese in my food diaries since I unconsciously regarded it as a neutral filler to keep hunger at bay!)

I did take a couple of capryllic acid tablets last night. Something I will probably be wary of revealing on my food diary, if I get to fill it in at all, since this would seem to write me off as someone trying to perform his own nutritional therapy rather than awaiting expert help.

The only other possible factor is hunger. I do remember going to bed with the subjective feeling of hunger. The curry was a thin veggie affair after all.

Anyway, the insomnia, at least is something I have avoided for the majority of the time I have been living here. M____ has observed over and over that I sleep like a log.

Most of the curry was left in the pressure cooker from Friday. I was cursing and swearing to open it and find it mouldy. Such a waste of time and food.

Attack of the zombies

I have several years’ experience of taking slow-release vitamin B supplements and I have come to observe numerous times that if I take it late at night, I don’t sleep, and indeed have a very similar experience to when I have caffeine, and similar to those times I don’t sleep after beer. This was in the back of my mind yesterday when I took such a slow-release multi-vitamin with vitamin B late yesterday. Worse, perhaps, I swilled it down with Spirulina, which I have not been taking recently but which I found to have a real beneficial effect when I first tried it around the same time as I started taking vitamin B those years ago.

I had been sleeping well in my new bed. With no students around I was at home all the time, of course, and the double bed  they had left was an improvement on the fold-out sofa bed we had been sleeping on at my folks. In fact, in however many weeks we have been there - two, I think - this was my first poor night’s sleep.

I was spiked, like I am after coffee, that is, alert, and yet very tired. My thoughts weren’t racing, and I drifted in and out of sleep, but it was shallow sleep.

Often in this condition I remember my dreams better than usual. This time I did so as much from getting up to go to the toilet as anything else, but my sleeping pattern was definitely disrupted, and I have been feeling the effects since around three o’clock when I’ve been feeling zombified.

I suspect it is a kind of lucid dreaming. I have felt that many times, that I am aware of myself dreaming. This time I was in a recording studio listening to the producer, who I could not see through the widow, talking to the black hip hop-style performer as I was setting up equipment or some such. They were talking about children, family, a fairly deep, mature conversation, and then a little more polite perhaps, the singer talking about how he didn’t know so many producers in America since there are so few of them, more in Britain. I don’t now remember it well.

It was years ago I first started taking vitamin B and though it made my piss resemble a cantonese duck marinade, and abslutely stink (I am pretty paranoid about the smell, which is what I imagine urine might smell like were you to reduce it in a pan for a while, wiping my old man countless times while at home, and shaking and squeezing the fella at urinals), it seemed to make me concentrate better. At least, I felt so at the time - it gave me extra confidence.

Back then I was working in a hardware store, and doing a pretty cackhanded job of it, invariably forgetting several items of a short list of jobs to do given by the infinitely genial and forgiving boss everyday. Often, in giving me verbal instructions, he would report that I had assumed my glassy-eyed look. This was a look that came over me involuntarily when I wasn’t interested, and however much I wanted this time to just see out those few instructions, it wouldn’t happen. Fortunately, there was another guy there who was similarly afflicted, who would himself muddle up the simplest things, and we became a right double act. He wasn’t ADD, though he was dyslexic and says this affected his memory, but he was the kind of character who can really make a place worthwhile, and when I had come back to the Black Country after uni, when I had gone to uni to escape this place, he was somebody who helped me cope with the place. He was the first person, really, I opened up to about my writing when before, it had been a guilty secret tangled up with my illness.

For a while I had been worried about the exclusion diet and whether I would be able to continue taking multivitamins, before from the leaflet I was given it wasn’t all too clear. I don’t want to be quite so laissez faire with fruit as it says, since I do think fruit can be a trigger itself - the amount of bananas I have eaten over the years has always been excessive, for a start, and then there’s the smoothies and dried fruits and the rest of it. It may be that I would not get enough vitamins and minerals on the diet to compensate for a deficiency in my processing of vitamins - one that the sores in the corners of my mouth, for instance, would seem to indicate. If this were the case, then presumeably, I wouldn’t necessarily see any benefit in symptoms from the exclusion and the diet would not be as useful as it should be. But from fretting about the vitamins, I begain to wonder whether the supplementation regimen I have settled upon bares any relation to what I need. How would I know? I mean, presumeably, it is possible that I might feel some extra security from these pills, and gain some confidence as I did those years ago, without actually seeing any real benefit. I decided for that reason to cease some of the supplements yesterday. I didn’t take anything in the morning, and certainly didn’t feel bad for it, indeed I found I could concentrate better than I often can (though it is always difficult to judge, and it is true that I was listening to audiobooks rather than trying to read for most of the morning, and this may make a difference). But I didn’t hold my nerve. Later, I started to drift a little. I wasn’t concentrating and it was my last day off, and my last day without interruption and without M____, so that’s when I took a multivitamin and washed it down with spirulina.

I some kind of a build up in my head. Now, I was working on a pretty tough passage, trying to introduce Darren, and I was getting into real philosophy, with Godwin’s Treatise on Political Justice in front of me, but this was something other than mental strain. It was a kind of build up I had to wait to pass.

So the question is still unsettled. I will have to exclude vitamin supplements sometime, but there is as much a problem in weaning myself off them than there is even with alcohol and cheese because of the security blanket phenomenon. It’s clear that vitamins can have their negative effects, stopping me from sleeping and the positive effects are more or less presumed for much of the time.

That’s something I will have to tackle some more before further taking on this diet. Once I have had a good night’s sleep, of course.

Oh, and the first real slip since the transition phase of this new diet ( though the only real thing now I haven’t excluded to be on the diet for real is lemon juice): I had a cup of black decaf coffee around three o’clock, because that can’t hurt, can it!

Trip

I’ve been on another trip with students, and I’ve come back much more settled, and looking forward to my move to new accomodation. I’ve been jokey with M____ again, playing around, and she has sensed that I am looking forward to the move. This could perhaps be taken as proof conclusive of how I am sensitive to changes in my routine.

By and large I was ok there. I took a lot of food with me and for the first time really anticipated the difficulties I would have with food and compliance to my diet. After all, I am away a lot, and came to feel that I was using trips and birthdays and celebrations and the like as excuses for non-compliance. Especially a problem, I am coming to see, was that I was using non-compliance in one often less avoidable sense as an excuse for non-compliance elsewhere, particularly with smoking and caffeine: I am tired from not sleeping from eating cheese and drinking beer, so I need nicotine or caffeine to perk myself up. This despite having proved this logic flawed again and again.

I did have a little caffeine over there, but not as much as I have elsewhere. I had batter with fish, and black pudding which contained oats and wheat flour. And I had flapjacks most days. But otherwise I did better than I often do, and didn’t feel myself drifting off quite so much as I have in the past.

I have been back a couple of days now and I have fallen into the old rationalisations. Yesterday I had a decaf coffee, telling myself I fancied the taste. I had it with sugar, because I had sugar a couple of times in Wales and didn’t feel any real ill-effects (before I have noticed that the effects of sugar are cumulative). I then had another, unconsciously (as I admitted to myself once or twice before repressing it) wanting the caffeine.  This morning I woke very tired, as I tend to do once this caffeine vicious spiral has taken off, and eventualy succumbed to a full-strength coffee with sugar. Soon after (and no less tired) I began to feel that I was drifting while reading Bleak House, I can’t recall the reveries, but they were there.

I have wondered whether I should ditch the idea of full food diaries and simply record days of compliance. Ie. caffeine - 3 days, gluten 4, dairy, 7, beer 3, spirits 5, nicotine 24. This would then simplify the record and all slips would be regarded as such with neither decaf coffee nor flapjacks regarded as somehow borderline cases. It would also help me in interpreting the evidence since I rarely/never look over old diaries and am only able, therefore, to interpret a single day’s reactions. I am sure there could be a good calculation too to record the resultant mood and concentration, perhaps involving the day’s results plus some fraction of the preceeding days. Some months ago I became possessed with the idea of trying to input into Microsoft [reveries of playing guitar for everyone at work, triggered by Blind Melon’s No Rain, but continuing from regular soundchecking reverie] Excel. I couldn’t manage it, and it became just one of the many hundreds of structures I have attempted to impose on my life that have fallen by the wayside, along with the transparencies I was hoping to draw graphs and pictagrams on and all the rest of it. This blog is the most successful so far!

One thing I noticed from Wales was that the sores in the corners of my mouth completely cleared up.

But I’m still rather out of it. I’ve just been reading an interesting article on M.E. and food intolerance http://www.ldmeg.org.uk/jb/food.htm which I found after looking up caffeine intolerance, wondering how much of my problems may stem from this. I intend to follow the writer’s advice regarding sprouted seeds, indeed I’ve just ordered a book she suggests, The Sprouters Handbook by Edward Cairney from E-Bay and I may go and buy a couple of things in a health food shop later when I’ll be dragged to Mardy Hell by M____. Now though, I think I should go and write an article in my other blog that I’ve been meaning o write for a while.

Oh, one piece of news: I have decided to go for a position at work which I’m led to believe would involve cooking with students.