Dances with DS

Well the doc has been seen. Turns out ‘he’ is a ’she’ so now I feel all sexist!   The long and short of it is that while she won’t discount it could be an allergy to cobolt,  she is not going to test for it either. It’s very rare she said,  so maybe that is why she won’t test?      She also said perhaps it is a virus … she may be right. Thing is we will never know either way which is a tad frustrating.  So this remains inconclusive, alas, as so many medical matters do until they present with a life threatening scenario.

She did prescribe antihistamines and cortisone cream & the good news is my mum seems to be getting better after only 2 doses. 

Aside from that - I am packing.  Ironing & gathering. Cooking dog food in advance. I’m off on Friday for a week. I’m flying up & then we will drive the 14 hours back home.

So mostly it’s boring stuff really except for the mouse experiment.

Recently we have been plagued by mice. I’m not afraid of them, but the most revolting part of my tale is that one died in my toaster.  

Yes, you read that right!  It’s the kind of thing one think’s won’t ever happen to one. I’d feel like a dirty cow - if not for the fact that everyone in my street has been complaining about being over run by the little vermin.

Anyway I almost can’t write about it without wanting to chuck. There was a potent rotting smell & we turned the kitchen inside out looking for the source of it. Gipping all the while. Very last thing we thought off handedly to check was the toaster. Thank goodness we did.

I won’t go into the horrid details. Needless to say we threw out the toaster and since then I can’t bring myself to buy another one.  Despite my frustration, I can’t bear the thought of poisoning them. I like mice generally - well the pet one’s anyway. But the mess wild mice make, the droppings everywhere & possible disease, the no toaster scenario, the scrabbling noises - enough is enough!  So we bought several humane traps and loaded them with tidbits.  The mice blithely ignored these. Instead they bit through the tupperwares in my cupboard to try to feast on nuts, oats & barley.  It’s quite scary what they will eat.  Tupperware?!  

At night they’d scrabble away under the floor boards driving me mad & upsetting the dogs.  I thought it was just about time to call in the council and accept humane was not going to work & it would be a case of karma then. But before this last resort I decided first to concoct a mouse deterrent spray out of some essential oils that I have in my stash. I read that mice hate mint, which I thought was probably a ridiculous urban myth but worth a try anyway. It smells nice & fresh in the kitchen at the very least.   I made a potent minty-plus-some-other- things brew & sprayed it everywhere. Three days in & I can’t believe silence has descended.  I keep thinking they might just be wearing slippers or something.

So tonight is the iron test. I have removed every little crumb of anything edible from their reach. I will prepare a ‘ miniture ‘Babettes feast’ for them - a plate of everything they have tried to nibble on plus more. I’ll spray the brew around  the plate & we shall see if they have just got super wiley.

If it works for real, I can’t tell you how pleased I will be!  No poison traps, no constant scratching noises, no karma .  Fingers crossed it does the job! But even if it does I probably will never again see a toaster in the same light again….eeeucch!

I have been on the formulating track!  Pottering about experimenting with much facial & body cream making and having several disasters into the bargain!  Creams that are too thin mostly which I then call ’serums’ for my own peace of mind and to try to hoodwink myself into using the botch!  It’s a big learning curve.  While I love to do it and am reaping the benefits of my homemade lotions & potions in many ways it has also made me realise nothing in life is simple! Well,not for me anyway. Where others fly into such things and have great success, I am  slow learner and one of those who must be unblessed with the karma of having to learn from her (many ) mistakes. 

I have always been waywardly creative & also I have always had a very keen interest in herbal medicine which solidified (for want of a better word) after my dog Zenni had a severe skin problem  - so for me this is a perfect synergy and an excellent learning curve. And of course my dire hair days have been inspiration to get cracking with a solution too!

Most of the recent facial/body cream experiments are because my mum called me - she had developed swollen eyes and an exzema-like skin that was full of rash on her face.  We bounced around several possible causes. Could it be the fish oil she takes?  I thought this unlikely as usually unless one has an allergy to fish/seafoods these are anti-inflammatory but I said I would try to look into the possibility. Secondly we wondered,  could it be her face cream?  We have always been big ‘Environ fans’ in this household - it’s a patriotic thing! Every time I go to South Africa I stock up.

I decided to look at the ingredients Environ use. Oh woe is me! Sweet bejuscus!

Ignorance is truly bliss especially if something does appear to work.  It was kind of upsetting to see the use of mineral oil in some of the products plus some other ingredients I would not personally want on my skin, had I but known. While I won’t make an enemy of mineral oil as I think it probably has a place in cosmetic world I just wonder why the manufacturers can’t use more natural equivalents. I did feel a tad upset as it is hard to part with one’s conditioning that something is ‘good’. And there are still bottles of the stuff on my bathroom shelf.

Anyway long & short of it I did think maybe it was her cream causing the trouble and we decided she should use only the purest, softest of things such as sweet almond oil and oats as a poultice etc,  to clean and moisturise her face.  The other approach would be to stop any supplements etc as well.   Meantime I promised her that I would formulate and make her a set of the most non allergenic/non irritating toiletries possible, to tide her over until this cleared up.  Of course not realising that in fact it is one difficult mother to make such a cream, as it cannot be done safely without the use of preservatives for example. Or emulsifiers which are chemical in nature.  So began a long investigation into the use of minimal risk preservatives & emulsifiers.  Then the dawning that just because something is ‘natural’ does not necessarily veto it for safety & allergies especially are unpredicable!  Even gentle nut oils can spark a dangerous reaction in some people. So where to draw lines and where to reduce even the least risks?

Then late last night stirring away at a possibility for the cream, it hit me that quite recently she had decided to go for Vit B12 injections.  In South Africa these are willy nilly doled out as ‘energy boosters’ by nurses and not even monitored and people convince each other that it works. Perhaps it really does help some people to feel that they have more energy.  She has been so tired of late.   I did feel dubious about her doing this at the time - the problem being that I walk the fine front of mega supplementation myself.  I know there are fine lines drawn between deficiency and how things can move into toxicity and my attitude is if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it!  On the other hand if is provebly broke - shift into high gear and look at all possible synergies to get things back on track!

Armed with new thoughts I started plugging away at some research in the wee hours of the morning. Out came the old moth eaten scrawny-eared books and I rolled through the internet in search of Vit B12 related allergies, looking for correlating data.

Some interesting things emerged. Firstly it is possible to have an allergic reaction to the injection and even to oral Vit B12.  It can affect the skin in the exact same way my mum’s skin is affected.  It seems the problem is not so much the amount of Vit B12 per se, rather it seems to be an allergy to cobolt, or to the preservative in the injection which is an alcohol.  Aside from swelling & a skin rash, the other symptoms may be chest pains, breathlessness, heart palps, anxiety & panic attacks, numbness or tingling of some parts of the body.

Cobolt allergy is quite rare when it comes to substances that cause allergies. I never even knew Vit B12 had cobolt in it… how limited my knowledge is! But one goes on learning.

I thought on all of us weight loss surgery patients, some of whom need these injections, sometimes life long.  It’s a strange thing - I always thought about toxicity issues with vitamins, but having allergies occur as a result of them has just never crossed my mind before.

Of course with an allergy, just a smidgen can set off a reaction. It has nothing to do with amounts although more of anything one is allergic to could spiral things into dangerous reactions.

While Vitamin related allergies don’t seem to be that common, I do think as with everything, we should always try to be aware of symptoms & side effects of any & all the supplements we take. As well as the fact that we could have an allergic reaction.  So now you know that if you develop dermatitis anywhere on your body after taking Vit B 12, it is time to speak to your surgeon or doc.  With oral supplementation I read of a type of hand dermatitis that appears to be incurable. I just hope that was a site that was mistaken!

As for my mum, I phoned her first thing this morning. She was not home & I had a non Vit B12 induced panic attack!  What if she was going for another injection today - god forbid!  My mind started to see all sorts of horrible outcomes. Eventually I got her on her mobile. She was shopping.  I told her what I thought might be a possibility.  ‘Just as well you told me’ she said.  ‘I had another jab booked for either today or tomorrow!’  

There are times I loathe my intuition.  I try to ignore it’s persistent nagging and do the ostrich thingamajiggy.  Then there are times I am so grateful for it even if it boogered up my good nights rest with anxiety!

Of course we don’t know if this is injectable B12 related yet. I hypothesize broadly.  I might be barking up the wrong tree. It happens to me quite often that I think I am on the right track in my head but I am not.  Because of it I have learned to never think I have found the B-all & end all of any situation. Still there are enough indications here for us to take note and at least get it properly medically investigated.

When I called my mum early this morning to tell her what I had found out she asked me if I remembered that at one stage she had a new pair of spec’s and her face swelled up each time she wore them?  Then there was the watch that caused the same effect on her wrist.  At the time it was a mystery.  Cobolt???

She’s off to the GP today so we should know what he thinks it of it all.

On other notes, things in the hoose have ceased altogether. I find myself being narky and irritable about it all. I have tried to be more relaxed and won, but sadly only for a few hours.  I’m sooooo frustrated. It seems life is intervenening with any progress. Pete is off and away on business trips every week almost.  It’s not great stuff for any relationship. He returns knackered and then I hate myself for being so irritable and unreasonable. I fill my head with the ’shoulds’.  I should be glad he is doing well in bad economic times, I should not moan, I should just get on with it myself, I should stop being so frikkin self indulgent emotionally, I should remember my pact with the gods to be kinder to everyone where-ever and whatever & I should remember this kind of thing starts with the one’s one loves….and so on. Then after all of this headstuff, as if it was not enough’  I hear my inner voices starting on the ‘you better be grateful for what you have got stuff!’   *sigh*.  It only makes me worse.

In a bid to just try to rebalance marital matters,  on the spur of the moment Pete suggested that I consider flying up to Croatia at the end of the week to join him there and then we’d take a few days off and find a nice little coastal area to go and relax in.  That’s when I realised just how enmeshed my mindset has become about getting the house in order.  I started with my ‘…but the house ….’ business. Then realised I was being a fool. The house is not ALL THAT!  Even if it feels like it many a day.   What has happened to me?  Where is my get up & go spirit?

So I am getting up and going.  We will be somewhere on the coast (haven’t even worked out exactly where yet!) and there will be loads of heat & sunshine. I am  not wearing a bikini needless to say, ( oh my lord the skin, the skin!)  but I am going to be wearing a smile.

Since I last wrote not much has transpired on the renovation front.  I find it  frustrating but decided that the choice is mine. I can stress out and feel the impact,  or just do what I can when I can. So far I’m holding firm, but sometimes I need to remind myself of my personal pact with myself!

Probably to comfort myself,  I have been drinking a lot of tea recently and was a tad horrified when I added up the amount of daily sugar I am ingesting.  It’s not like it’s ’snucking in’ either - oh noooo,  I’m fully aware of my daily transgressions! 

Although I don’t gain weight from it, I feel concerned about the amount of hypo type attacks among WLS patients and deep in my heart I know this sugary bint is not good for me. But unlike the moving through chocolate/sweets/carb addiction, where I felt it had to be resolved,  I don’t want to give up my sugary tea!  And as it is impossible to move through issues in one’s life if one is simply not willing to do so - even knowing the risky ropes one walks!

I am not hypo in anyway thank heavens, not yet,  but I worry I might be playing with a wee fire in the longerterm.   However,  tea without sugar is not really for me. I like it sweet!  I have at times tried alternatives. Sweeteners I can’t abide & never will take as I am not convinced they were not a part of my obesity triggering into the nightmare it was. Honey is lovely, but still a high GI, if a little healthier than sugar. Agave nectar did not rock my boat at all and I read some downsides to permanent use of it as I recall.

Like all good things I stumbled on the answer to my prayers by pure chance.  I went for a little shop-about at Mr Atif’s grocery store to buy hibiscus flowers (to rinse my hair with) and some spices, and there was a jar of curious brown stuff called palm sugar (or sometimes ‘coconut’ sugar). As I need to taste everything upon this earth at least once ( personal mission! :-P  )  I bought a jar. I came home and opened the jar to taste and there was this solid mass of sugar. Hard as a rock!  I scraped at it and it was sooooo delicious.   The same sweetness as sugar, maybe a little more even, with a mild mild caramel note, very similar to raw brown sugar. Sooooo Gorgeous!

But  what to do with it?   I decided to try to find some palm sugar recipes on the internet and this is when I discovered that this sugar is not only delish, but also highly nutritious. Not only that,  it is low GI.  I know the low GI theory has it’s flaws but it also makes some sense to me. I think that palm sugar won’t impact those weight loss surgery patients who find sugar pushes them  into an overwhelming addictive cycle. Just hypothesizing here, but for those who need a little something sweet occasionally , this might just tick the boxes. I’m not advocating it as part of the weight loss drive, because it has got calories!  But all of us have our own mileage regarding such matters and must find our own valleys & mountains in the world of food.   I also think if a WLS patient needs to do the rounds with sugar to stop the weight loss for example, this sugar is a very good option as it won’t hammer one’s insulin responses.   The only gripe I have with palm sugar is how I could crumble it, because scraping at the rock is a story. I think a hammer might just do - or maybe my pestle & morter. It is VERY hard and compact.  Next week, I am walking away from sugar for good & palm sugar will be my new  replacement.

On this site there is some info about coco-sugar/ palm sugar - just look at all those fine, hard to come, by micronutrients will you!  

http://www.naturesblessings.com.ph/cocosugar.htm

Onto other things, since I last henna’d my hair I have factored in several ‘glosses’ of indigo.  A gloss  is really just a conditioner into which I stir a couple of teaspoonss of indigo. As I don’t want black hair,  I only leave it on for 35 mins to get what I want.  Like magic it mellows out the highly red tones of the henna pushing it more towards a deep reddish -brown colour. This way I am maintaining no grey (YAY!) and more importantly  my hair is finally truly recovering from the onslaught of chemicals I used to subject it to.  I did think maybe my DS was the cause of this breaking, frizzy dry hair I suddenly got (as usual - blame the DS). But if that was the case and it had been caused by low nutrient levels alone - I doubt I’d have seen such a fast improvement.  Mind you I have been upping the copper and that might be a player too!   This is the dilemma with a WLS - you never quite know if it’s the surgery causing the problem, or if it is an unrelated thing. Sigh.  The best one can do is try to go multifactorial in one’s approach, not always easy by any means. But you know, if in doubt whack it hard from every conceivable angle!

Part of my ‘multifactorial’ approach was to also begin to seriously contemplate whether I should continue to use shop bought shampoo. Increasingly my head has felt itchy, tight and sensitive after shampooing. Not enough to make me stop for a very long time, but unmistakeably a warning signal.  I also felt I have worked pretty hard to get the hair into a better state via natural means & that by using a regular shampoo I’d potentially undo the work.  I thought I would look into some ‘top end’ shampoo’s out there, in the hopes I could find something less chemically endowed than my usual shampoo. This is how I began to realise that firstly I could not afford ‘top end’ ongoingly, and secondly I wondered if they were ‘all that’ for the money!  So I researched  and while a few do tick my boxes, they don’t totally tick them. Some are actually just a cocktail of potentially harmful chemicals under beguiling souffle names and organic ingredients so trace that one wonders why they even bothered to stick them into the product. The skeptic in me thinks it might be because making a big noise about the ‘naturals’ can reap good profits.

So began a huge experimentation for the making of a shampoo for my own and my families needs out of the least harmful substances I could find.   The problem, or challenge being that a homemade shampoo can also be a flipping disaster, safe or not!  I tried the soapnuts and although they cleansed my hair, I felt they were messy and I hankered for viscosity &  foam.  The ph of Castile soap is too alkaline for me to feel fine about using it on my hair - so before I knew it I was on yet another mission! I have spoken to sellers of  raw materials relating to shampoo and gathered various possibilities, some mildly viable, others just a waste of time!  I have slogged away, cooking up terrible batches of soapy spongey gunge that would not thicken or would not foam or both! I have spoken to kindred spirits like myself, tired of the chemical soup of daily life and driven to create better ways forward and they have kept me going at it and discussed with me such finer matters as whether natural always means safe & good and what the heck Ammonium Cocoyl Isethionate or polyquaternium-7 actually is!

It has taken weeks to try to perfect a shampoo that would cover our needs. Meantime I have  been unsatisfactorily soapnutting.   At times I thought I would just go back to good ole shop bought -I was beginning to see that the making of a great shampoo is no easy thing and to realise I am just not purist enough to survive on soapnuts hairwise ( for all their very valid virtues.) Then last night I finally cracked it! There it was - a beautiful viscous clear liquid, a pillar of perfection!  Well just about - all I lack as yet is a really moving amount of foam (of all things!), the hedonist in me awakens yet again.

Using mild coconut based ingredients & emulsifiers, herbal extracts and some essential oils I created a 95% fantastic shampoo. (5% is on hold until I break the back of the foam mystery!) I do get a low grade foam but not enough yet to say it is a 100% product of my dreams. Still,  I have many positives to be pleased about.  I did not even need to condition my hair after using it. Which is unbelievable as usually I use mounds of the stuff. My hair is soft and shiny and starting to look like it has truly turned a very big corner. My daughter tried out the formula this morning and although we have very different hair (hers is fine but thick, mine is coarser) she had the same outstanding results. She left for work with her hair looking beautifully glowing and nourished and I felt a huge sense of accomplishment and that if I put my mind to it I can achieve whatever I need to - even if it is only creating a shampoo! And I will get that foam tip top yet, even if I have to research heaven & earth to unleash it!

But the best was yet to come -  I bumped into a friend today, who saw me a couple of weeks ago and she (who never comments on my looks in anyway) was paying me enough hair based compliments to last me a good year or so - lol!    It was like a confirmation for me. Funny that, even though I know because it is evident that this is good stuff, somehow hearing her say so really brought it home.

Soooo, researching and a self made crash course in both chemistry & hair biology has kept me on my mental toes.

My comments box is on ( upper left in the heading box in small red writing - just click ‘ no comments’. I’m not techie it should read comments on , but it does work!) If you know where we can get palm sugar at a good price, or have any comments to share with us, please feel free.

And that’s about it for now! 

The heading kind of says it all!  I had a great morning at our local farmers market on the forage for tasty foods to try out.  I really love to shop there because people take personal pride in their foods and their businesses. They have stories to tell about their ventures into starting small business. Sometimes there are priceless sharings of a common interest.

At one stall I met a wonderful Sri-lankan lady & her hubby who had baked an array of seriously yummylicious cakes. The emphisis was on spices & I love spices myself. Having proclaimed my adoration for all things nice & spice, they proceeded to cut me little bites of almost every cake on their stand.

The game was on - I had to guess the spice involved!  I thought maybe I had died and gone to spice paradise. I forgot that around 99% of what I was eating would inflate me later!  Ginger, Lemongrass, Sweet honeyed cinnamon, cardomum, clove and a nutmeg so pungently fragrant, so rich in creamy undertones, that the resinous aftertaste will haunt me forever. I was lost, lost to my DS in the moment…(though now I am fretting somewhat! lol.) I told them after that incredible taste I would never again be able to eat Tesco’s nutmeg again. They beamed from ear to ear and told me they could not either and that they bought back a fresh stash of whole nutmeg every time they visited Sri Lanka.

I’d gone to market thinking I might just buy a cake for the family, but ended up with:

A free range chicken, 30 free range organic eggs, organic carrots and a massive broccolli,  a loaf of spelt & seed bread, a hefty punnet of olives marinated in rosemary, tomato & onion, tomato & chilli relish, a mild soft smoked cheese, mango & apricot cheese, a strawberry tart, 3 aloe vera & mangosteen health drinks, a lemongrass -lemon curd & cherry cake and 4 Sri-Lankan heavenly nutmeg cupcakes!

Happily it was only around the corner from my home otherwise I would have buckled under the weight of it all!

I should have had some of the cheese for lunch  but the lemongrass -lemon curd & cherry cake was shouting my name. So I had a large slice…as if I had forgotten my ‘protein first’ ethic - lol!  To get the protein voice that was about to erupt into a guilt fest out of my head,  I had a large fortified vanilla milkshake.

Am I going to suffer later?  Very likely. Tonight I might well be queen of the loo.  I could have got away with a couple of slices of cake, but I had around a full slice in samples around!  It never ended there either. At many tables I was offered glorious looking samples of carby food….homemade pastries, crackers with cheese, onion and cheese bread, garlic bread, homemade peanut biscuits…it all adds up. I think the only healthy thing I sampled was about a cup of various marinaded olives!   But how could I refuse?!

For some reason people feed me. I always feel slightly nervous because I start getting paranoid and thinking I must look sickly and too thin! But I think that’s just me being silly. 

They are probably delighted to have another foodie enthusiasing away, as indeed I do. I can’t help it & I’m not going to apologise for this side of my nature because it was not always this way. There was a time I was never graciously offered food by strangers. More likely if I dared sample something I would get blatantly ignored. Funny how being so overweight used to either make me totally invisible or the total focus of other peoples disdain & dietary advice.  One would think I’d be over that having lived in a slim skin for many years now, but when I think of it I still feel slightly scoured at the edges of my being.

Tonight I will season the chicken with fresh thyme, garlic, rosemary and smother it in lemon butter. I fancy it roasted to a golden crisp with baby onions & potatoes plus carrots and the monster sized broc.

Soooooo, I have food on the brain today.  It happens from time to time that I get a smaller version of my old obsession. But I have come a long long way even if I say so myself.  Once half that curd cake would have been eaten. Plus ALL the cupcakes. ALREADY.  I doubt I would have had any fresh veg in my basket, well maybe a few carrots at most.  As for ’spelt’ bread - no ways!  What the heck was ’spelt’ anyway,  I liked mine whiter than white and very thickly sliced.

Everytime I think of it this way I am so glad for my DS.  I remember prior to the surgery I honestly thought I would never be able to eat again. It haunted me. I actually can’t figure out exactly why, because I was past enjoying food. In fact ironically,  I detested the entire eating process  - but I could not stop myself  from needing to do it so badly that it sometimes hurt.  Oh & as I struggled through the first months how at times I felt outright depressed by what seemed such a trying hopeless effort, just to drink enough water, never mind eat.  I’d look at the families meals longingly and think I had doomed myself to a life without anything but protein & water!

It took me an age to realise it was a wonderful thing to enjoy one’s food. That it was okay - infact it was NORMAL!  (For want of a better word.) To realise that I could eat & let go off 20 years of eating related baggage.  I first realised this when I caught myself tuned into all the telly programs about cooking with no holds barred    …instead of the one’s about Marcy losing 11 stone in 4 months and livin’ the low fat life !

I’m still dead grateful for my Duodenal Switch.   It made me reach a joy about good food that would have been impossible without it.  And that is only one way it has changed my life for the better.