Bad MuthaBlogger

We got our blood test results back from ALCAT which cost an arm and a leg, but hey, no regrets. It had to be done. We couldn’t stay in the dark any longer with me fumbling about like a blind idiot trying to figure things out myself. Truth told, I was making a right pig’s ear of things.

To my horror, I found out that I had been giving my little bun-buns all the top foods that he can’t tolerate. Thinking I was helping him out when in fact I was sending him over the edge. Giving him things like beef, green peas and bananas. Seemingly benign foods, but poisonous to the bunny. Not good. No wonder he hasn’t been getting any better.

Overall the situation is much, much worse than I feared. Our list of food intolerances is unbelievably, mind-boggling, huge.

We’ve gone to see a specialist. A nutritionist who claims that she can help us recover. For the last few days she’s put us on an extreme elimination diet. All we’re allowed to eat is millet, lamb, chicken, carrots, courgette, chard and spinach. It all has to be organic, and it all has to be pre-washed in grapefruit seed extract to kill molds and bacteria. That’s our lot for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Since I’m vegetarian, I’ve got even less to look forward to at mealtimes. It’s only been 3 days and already I have millet coming out of my ears. Millet schmillet. After this, I never want to see bird seed again.

The nutritionist said we should start to see results straight away, but if anything things are getting worse. Yesterday bunny broke out with a whole host of new symptoms – a red rash around his mouth and under his arms, and then screaming in pain with constipation, and tossing and turning throughout the night. It took me a few hours to figure out that we had used chicken stock (ready-made) and it had cider vinegar in it. Plus he also ate chicken pre-cooked from the deli at Wholefoods which apparently is seasoned with all kinds of nasty things that bunny can’t tolerate. So the relapse in symptoms could be due to the combination of these things.

But then tonight, same thing. A new ring of red spots and a an even nastier red ring appeared around his poop hole, looking all raw and bloody. Plus the same excruciating constipation and difficulty sleeping. He didn’t want to eat any solid food since lunchtime, just my breastmilk, so that makes me think it’s something that I ate today. But what? I haven’t been very good at staying on the strict diet, so could it have been the rice drink I had this morning? Or the cherries I had at lunchtime? Or is he intolerant to millet and lamb aswell?

I am pulling my hair out, gnawing on the table legs, scouring the internet for information, and generally getting very frustrated and freaked out about bunny’s health. I know I’m not alone, because every time I do an internet search I get millions and zillions of results. Food intolerances, leaky gut, celiacs disease – these things are a growing epidemic. It’s out of control. We’re a nation of sickly bicklys, falling apart at the seams.

But knowing I’m not alone, doesn’t make me feel heaps better. I really am at the very, very end of my sanity tether. There’s only a few strands holding me together. One more slip and I’ll be down at the funny farm.

At this point, I’ll do whatever it takes to make bunny better. I’ll even drink my own urine. Who knows, maybe a wee drop of the amber nectar would do the trick. Extremis malis, extrema remedia. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I really want to blog more than once a fortnight, but OMG I am so effing TIRED. I hardly know which way is up or down any more. Sleep deprivation has taken its toll and I have been reduced to a mere shell of a mama. Clear thinking I am not. I am dull with fatigue. All the colour has bleached out of me, leaving a faint wash of weary, dreary grey.

I’m finding it hard to stay up past bunny’s bedtime. And that’s the only time I have to blog. The rest of the day is hopeless since bunny keeps my hands fully tied from dawn to dusk. He’s the Duracell Bunny. Not to be confused with the Energiser Bunny, which is the American rip off version.

But I digress. I didn’t come online to blog about battery bunnies, fascinating topic that it is. Instead, I wanted to blog about bunny’s ailments. Bunny and I are falling way down the rabbit hole of food intolerances. There’s nothing left to eat. Really. We are withering away.

I spent a bucketload of dosh on blood tests which apparently aren’t all that accurate. Anyway, we don’t get the results for 2 more days. In the meantime, I am racking my addled, sleep-deprived brain for recipe ideas and toddler snacks that don’t have any gluten, grains, corn, soy, dairy, eggs, sugar, fruit, tomatoes, potatoes, chicken, pork or turkey in them. If you have any ideas, PLEASE send them my way.

Up until today we were living on rice. We were eating more rice foods than you can shake a stick at. Rice cakes. Rice crackers. Rice cereal. Rice bread. Rice protein drinks. Rice milk. And rice itself of course. We had rice coming out of our ears. It was the last staple in our desert of a diet. I was clutching at rice straws with my last bit of strength. Thank goodness there was something to spread a little avocado on. Something white to splash over our sugar-free rice crispies. Something to crunch as an afternoon snack.

And then guess what? Today we have to eliminate rice aswell because despite all our food eliminations, bunny is STILL suffering from horrible symptoms. It’s unbelievable. Inconceivable. But there it is. The naked truth. We have nipped our options down to a nub. Nothing left for us to eat but vegetables, beans and meat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for the last 25 years, and I am almost at breaking point. I actually cooked  a couple of grass-fed beefburger bites for bunny this evening. He wolfed them down with great gusto, in true carnivore style.  All that vegetarianism in the womb has given him an appetite for blood.

This effort of extreme elimination has a purpose. We are desperately trying to reach baseline. Mostly for bunny. I don’t really give a monkeys about my own symptoms (although I would like just a tad more sleep and less of an itchy bum please). More than anything I want my baby boy to feel better, to eat better, to sleep better. If he sleeps better, then I will sleep better. If he’s happy, then I’m happy.

Baseline means that bunny doesn’t have any symptoms for at least 4 weeks. In other words: no rash, no pimples and no spots on his body, no eczema, no scaliness behind his ears, no compulsive ear tugging, no fussing and kicking at bed-time, and sleep cycles for more than 30 minutes at a time with no crying in between. So far the elusive baseline, has well… eluded us. We haven’t got there yet, but we will. I’m determined. I’m not going to let these foods get the better of me and my bunny.

We might have to eliminate beans. That’s next on the list. If nothing else it will certainly smell a bit sweeter around here.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about Bunny’s poop. I’ve taken a keen interest in it, ever since he was a baby and we had that Kombucha scare. But I sort of let the poop watch slide over the last few months. I got distracted. I had other shit to shoot. I forgot how important poop is in the parenting scheme of things.

The good news is, I’m back on poop watch alert now, and let me tell you, there’s mighty interesting  happenings down there in bun-buns nappies.

Toddler poop is different from baby poop. I wrote about the scoop on baby poop a year ago. The basic rules still apply. Black, tarry poop is not good and probably means internal bleeding, so get to the docs right away. Mucous in poop could mean a virus or stomach bug. Bright specks or streaks of blood could be from an allergy or food intolerance, or an anal fissure.

Toddlers can either be constipated, evident through lots of grunting and straining to squeeze out a small hard dry pellet or two. Or they can have diarrhea, with lots of watery and possibly green runny poo running out several times a day.

Other than that, healthy toddler poop is supposed to be like adult poop. In other words, medium brown, shaped like a banana, the consistency of toothpaste, with little smell or gas. It should leave the body smoothly and effortlessly, with no strain, sliding slowly into the water. Now, seriously folks, how many poos do you have that are like that?

Anyway, that’s the toddler scoop in a nutshell. Unfortunately, Bunny’s poop is by no means normal. At 16 months he should be having mini brown bananas, but instead he is alternating between daytime hard, dry scratchy pellets and early morning explosive poops the size of Belgium that leak out through his nappies and pyjamas, and sometimes out onto the bed. It’s a devil to clear up. Bunny is an active monkey in the morning. He doesn’t stay still for love or money. Changing a nappy chock full of chunky, runny diarrhea when bun-buns is wriggling around like a demon to escape, is no fun at 5am.

Back to the poop itself. The pellets look like large rabbit poops. I know he’s the Bunny, but this is taking it too far. It’s not like he’s been out in the fields eating grass all day.

The explosive poop is even more disturbing. It’s sort of brownish, but fibrous and stringy, and on closer inspection you can see that it is actually composed of oodles of undigested food from the day before, and even the day before that. Whole pieces of fruit come through unscathed. Pieces of carrot and potato. Rice crackers. Millet. It’s all there. This morning I noticed what looked like lots of sunflower seeds. Which is very odd, as we haven’t had any of those at all. Unless he’s been outside under the bird feeder picking up seed scraps without my noticing.

Of course, this is all connected to Bunny’s food intolerances and allergies that I’m finally getting to grips with, after several months of denial. I guess I didn’t really have my shit together before now. I did write that post back in November about bunny’s bleeding bum. But that was 8 months ago, and you’d think I’d have been more on the cack case since then. Beats the shit out of me why I haven’t been paying attention to things like the red ring around Bunny’s poop chute.  What kind of a crap mother am I, anyway?

As if it weren’t enough to be alcohol-free, drug-free, and partner-free, now I have to be gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, egg-free, tomato-free, berry-free, apple-free, nut-free, corn-free and sugar-free.

Phew! That, peeps, is a LOAD of frees to be dealing with. 

What in God’s name am I supposed to live on??? My entire existence has been built from aforementioned food staples. I NEED to eat bread and butter. I HAVE to eat omelettes. Without my cup of tea in the morning, I’m a useless pile of poo. I’m English, for goodness sake. I MUST have dairy, and if not dairy, then I MUST have soy substitute. Rice milk in tea is like cat’s piss. Almond milk curdles into stuff that looks like algae on a manky pond. Hemp milk? Bleugh!!!

The lowdown is that Bunny and I are suffering from multiple food intolerances and allergies. Quite why they have decided to rear their ugly heads into my life right now, is beyond my comprehension. I am HEALTHY! I drink lots of water! I exercise! I don’t smoke! I don’t eat food additives!

Anyway, it’s pointless fighting it. Acceptance is the only way forward. I’ve been in denial for the last 16 months, but no more! 

I knew Bunny was allergic to dairy since the get-go. And wheat. But the gluten connection only hit me like a ton of bricks in the last couple of weeks. All my spare time is now spent reading gluten free blogs.  I had no idea that gluten sensitivity was so common. 10 years ago, it was 1 in several thousand. Now around 1 in a hundred people have it. It’s an epidemic, peeps! We are ALL going to have a gluten intolerance by the time 2012 comes around. You mark my words!

It all seems so obvious now. Of COURSE he’s gluten intolerant. That’s what all the writhing and fighting in bed has been about. The eczema. The fatigue. The hyperactivity. The constant pulling of the right ear. The bloom of red rash over stomach, back, neck and face. The neediness. The not wanting to eat anything. The constipation. The diarrhea. Poor little bun-buns has been suffering for months now, and his ditzy mama has taken nearly a year and a half to figure it out. What’s more (and this is surely connected to the ditziness) I’ve been suffering from similar symptoms myself. I have a hideous rash on the back of my arms. I don’t sleep well. I’m spacey. My digestion is all messed up. I feel bloated and puffy.

Right now my kidneys and liver are aching so badly, that the doctor says I have to drink 3 to 4 litres of water A DAY to flush out my system!!! And if I want to get better I have to be absolutely adamant in eliminating all aggravating foodstuffs from my diet. It’s no joke, folks. Things have got to change big-time around here.

I feel like someone lifted a veil from my eyes, and suddenly the whole world looks different. Things make sense again. I have a handle on what is happening on Planet Bunny. It doesn’t look good, and I’m struggling but at least I’m not in a denial daze. I’ve got my feet planted firmly in reality land. I’m dealing with the cards I’ve been dealt, one hand at a time.

I’ve cleared out my kitchen cupboards and ditched all known allergens. I’ve bought my gluten free restaurant cards. I’ve ordered a couple of cookbooks. I even subscribed to “Living Without” magazine (pretty crap title if you ask me, not exactly enticing one to subscribe). I haven’t gone into the toiletries yet, but that’s next.

I have no idea how we’re going to get through playdates and lunchdates, nevermind traveling back to London next month to see the F.O.B. (I wonder if British Airways does a gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, vegetarian meal?) God only knows how challenging this is going to be once Bunny goes to preschool…

Somehow I am going to have to upgrade my culinary skills, and my communication skills, and muddle us through this minefield of food intolerances. It’s gonna be a steep learning curve.

We need a T-shirt. Some stickers. A sign or two to stick around the house. Food disabled. Nutritionally challenged. Please don’t feed.

On the upside, I’m bound to lose some weight around the middle on this diet. Look on the bright side, eh?

It’s birthday time again, bunny! 16 months today! Sweet 16!!! And oh, what a sweet-pea you are! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, bunnikins!!!

The big news this month is… da da da daaa… wait for it…

You WALKED!! Yes, you did it bunny!!! All on your ownsome!!! For the very first time!!! You’ve been pulling yourself up onto two legs for months now, but this month you let go and stepped into the great, wobbly unknown. I am so proud of you! Nevermind those other mothers who kept raising their eyebrows down the park, muttering about late walkers. You might be a late walker, but you’re walking now!

Those legs of yours are mighty strong tree trunks ready to take on the world. You’ve taken the wind out of your mama once or twice by kicking me in the stomach. Those legs pack a punch, I’m telling you. It’s only a matter of weeks before you start careering round the house on those pins, with your old mama wheezing right behind you.

Look! I caught you on film taking some of your first steps with me and Grandma. It was historic. A big milestone. Epic.

This month I made the mistake of taking you to a big music festival. I thought it would be fun. But it wasn’t. It was in a word, hell. Hotter than Hades. Big noises and  freaky looking, drugged-up people everywhere. Too much stimulation for a little bun-buns. You hated it. I hated it too. I’m too old for it, and you’re too young for it.

After a full hour meltdown screaming blue murder, you passed out on a bean bag in despair. Only to wake up horrified and screaming that we were still there 30 minutes later. Whereupon we went home. Pronto.

I won’t put you through that again I promise. To think I actually used to enjoy festivals. And to think one day you’ll actually enjoy festivals too. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?

We had another big outing with Grandma when we took the ferry over to Angel Island. You had a blast on the boat. I just know you’re going to be sailing the high seas yourself one day. It’s in your blood, bunny. Your great grandfather and grandmother were Olympic Gold medalists in yachting, you know. You have good genes in them there bones.

On the Island, we took a little tram all the way around so we could see the views from all directions, but not get too tired from walking in the hot sun. So much nicer than being at a horrible, crowded festival. You were a happy little bunny.  Look at that tufty of hair sticking up in the wind! It’s growing, sweetums! Very fine and blond, so kinda hard to see, but it’s growing bunny, I swear. One day you WILL have hair.

Food is a tricky subject right now. Some days you’ve been known to eat a whole banana in one swoop. But most of the time you’re a picky eater. I got you these pyjamas in the hopes that it might come true, that you might actually turn into a BIG EATER.  But so far, no such luck. There’s more food on the floor than in your stomach.

You’ve chomped the plastic rubber coating right off that there spoon, so I’ve had to order you some proper metal cutlery.

Your latest thing is to fling your food quite vigorously at your mama. You don’t seem to like anything I make. Or if you do, you soon come down with a rash and bad stomach ache and we have to eliminate that food from your diet. So far we’ve had to eliminate dairy, gluten (including wheat, oats, rye) tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, soya and eggs. Who knows what’s next? It’s been a BIG challenge for your mama. I’m at my wits end.

But the good news is that I think I’ve finally figured out your sleep problems. It’s all down to your diet. I thought you were a “wakeful baby” but it turns out the reason you wake up every 30 minutes crying is because your stomach hurts and you don’t feel well. It’s not rocket science and I don’t know why it’s taken me 16 months to figure it out. I’m sorry bunny. I blame my own sleep deprivation. I don’t think clearly when I don’t get any sleep.  But I’m confident if we can crack this food allergy stuff, then we’ll  both be able to sleep better. Let’s see how it goes next month, OK?

Hey, guess what? There’s a rumour that Grandpa J. and Grandma G. might be coming to visit this month? What do you think about that then?

Yep, I know. It’s hard to believe. They’re coming all this way just to see YOU. And me and auntie, of course. But mainly you. Grandma K. stitched that colourful wall hanging that you point at every day with all the crazy animals, you know?

We’re going to have a big QUIET adventure when they get here. Lots of fun, chilling in the garden, I promise. Pointing at buzzy bees and throwing pebbles in the stream. Just hanging out together with the fam.

We might even take them to the beach.  

That’s auntie’s bum, by the way, and not your mamas. Mine has a different shape to it.

It’s been another month of fun and games with you, bunny. I’ve learned so much with you. Even the hard times have been good times. It’s all so rich and rewarding every day, in every way. Thank you for being my little bunny on this wonderful journey through life. Happy birthday, bun-buns! I love you!

With all my love always,

Mummy xxxxxxxxxx