Why This Blog? Clues From My Freezer

    This morning I cleaned out my freezer.  I threw out all kinds of things--lunch meat, popsicles, a Weight Watchers microwave meal, ground beef, chicken in several forms, a Green Giant potato/green bean blend with sauce, tilapia, several kinds of buns and whole-wheat flatbread, white baby corn and a Mexi-corn mix with black beans, onions and peppers.  I looked at the huge, assorted pile before I stuffed it all in a bag and chucked it in the bin outside and as I did, thought about how funny it was that other than the fact that some of it had been in the freezer too long, every single thing I was throwing away had a common ingredient that would have made me chuck it all anyway.

    Really?  What does flatbread have in common with a popsicle, and what does that have in common with a box of chicken breasts?  The answer is in the last two things I listed.  Seriously????  Seriously.  Yup, it's corn.

    My nineteen-year-old daughter has been mysteriously, debilitatingly ill for the past 4 1/2 years.  It started in the spring of 2008 with severe, migraine-like headaches that we couldn't get effective treatment or relief for.  Her head always hurt.  Always.  Any medication we tried either didn't work, gave her an allergic reaction or she experienced the undesirable "possible but unlikely" side effects.

    Besides the head pain, she also experienced a variety of other symptoms that were baffling and frightening.  Every time we had any kind of test done, the results came back normal.  I got to where I actually felt angry when I got the call from the nurse saying, "Good news!  Her tests came out normal!" because several times I thought, "This is it!  We finally have answers!"

    Through all of this, Brittany showed incredible strength.  She has always had a very strong personality and a zest for life, and that has served her well through this trying time.  Even with the amount of pain she was experiencing, she would push through it a lot of the time to make it to school as much as possible, socialize with her friends, exercise, etc.  During the winter months in particular, school hours were the worst time of day for her and so she missed a lot of school because of how much pain she was in.  Often, when exercising, she would have to stop sooner than she wanted to because her head pain would increase.  I know it was very frustrating for her to not be able to do all the things she wanted to do.  Through it all I have been amazed at how often she has picked herself up, brushed herself off, and kept pushing ahead.  She has a great eye for photography and has become quite a camera bug--she loves experimenting with settings, angles and editing.  She is a very gifted writer and is very talented artistically, so she channeled a lot into writing and drawing.  She would also find ways to serve other people and do thoughtful things for them--one Christmas season she did The Twelve Days of Christmas anonymously for our elderly neighbor, putting little gifts on her porch on each of the twelve days leading up to Christmas.

    My searching finally led to an osteopathic doctor who, after a few visits, suggested that one of the things we might look into was food allergies.  I hadn't considered that food allergies could cause headaches; I always associated them with gastrointestinal problems, rashes, etc.  We had testing done in that office and that turned up a huge list of food allergies and sensitivities.  The ironic thing about this is that when all of this first started and I took her to the doctor after her first allergic reaction to medication, I had a feeling as I was going out of his office that she was allergic to wheat.  I turned around and said, "Do you mind if I ask you a question?"  He asked what I wanted and I said, "How do you go about determining if someone has a food allergy, like to wheat or something?"  I wish I had a camera shot of the look he gave me when I said that--like I was from Mars or something.  He shrugged his shoulders in a very offhand way and said, "Well, I guess you could take her off stuff and see what happens."  That's it.  That's all I got.  So I thought I must be the crazy one to bring that up and got the message loud and clear to keep my mouth shut on that subject.

    Isn't it funny that the testing at the DO's office confirmed that gut feeling about wheat, as well as one I had had about dairy?  Besides those two things the list also included all cheeses, barley, rye, corn, soy, peanuts, citrus fruits, raspberries, chocolate, caffeine, sucrose, fructose, aspartame and Splenda.  Pretty big list!  I had already had her off wheat and dairy for a month based on intuition before we had the testing done; man, I thought wheat was everywhere!  We eliminated everything on the list from her diet and saw dramatic improvements.

    Still, we would keep running into phases where she was feeling a lot better, able to be more active, etc. and then would get pummeled by head pain again.  Usually when this happens, it's a guaranteed 3 weeks or so before she's able to function during the day.  Every time this would happen, seemingly out of the blue, we could trace it to something different about her food.  I was very careful about ingredients but didn't know all the different names for corn.  Obviously I didn't feed her corn, and didn't buy anything with cornstarch or corn syrup listed, and didn't use these myself.  The first big one we found was xanthan gum, which I had been using in a gluten-free bread recipe.  I didn't know at the time that that was derived from corn.  Got rid of that, and 3 weeks later she was better.  Then we started making a connection between severe, shooting pain behind the eyes and citric acid.

    The really defining moment came one day this past March when I was getting a prescription refilled for her and I had a feeling to ask the pharmacist if there was cornstarch in the pills.  When I finally got the answer that there was, so many puzzle pieces started fitting together.  No WONDER none of the pain medicines had worked; she was taking this prescription every freaking day for two and a half years!  Not to mention the fact that most of the pain medications probably had cornstarch in them, as well.  I thought, "Could it really boil down to something as simple as a food allergy to corn?"  I have found, over and over since then that yes, it can and in her case it does.  Every instinct inside of me screamed to get that medication out of her body, NOW.  I immediately stopped the medication and two weeks later, after a lot of really terrible pain, she was at rest and day by day after that she seemed to wake up more and more.  Her manner and the bright-eyed personality I remembered from earlier years shone through and I thought, "Oh, THERE you are; I remember you!  I've missed you!"

    All this brings me to the single reason I have begun this blog.  I know I am just one in a huge sea of blogs out there, and by no means do I have all the answers.  I don't have zippy photos of fabulous recipes I have prepared, and I don't have enough technical know-how to have the most eye-catching blog out there.  But I have a story to tell, and I can't bear the thought of anyone living through the hell we have been living in for so many years when there are simple answers that will fix it.  If I had had the right doctor at the beginning who would take my question about food allergies seriously at the time, maybe my daughter would not have been robbed of enjoying her life in the ways that teenagers are supposed to be able to.  There are few things worse than seeing your child suffer and not being able to fix it.  There were several times over the past several years when I felt like I was watching her die.

    I am closing this entry by including a link that I found just over a week ago that lists traditional AND nontraditional corn allergy symptoms.  My daughter had all but about three symptoms on the list, including ones that mimicked bipolar symptoms.  If you or someone you love are experiencing any symptoms on this list, please look at a corn allergy before you accept any other diagnosis and take any prescriptions to the pharmacy.  http://www.cornallergens.com/symptoms/corn-allergy-symptoms.php  The site also mentions the Avoiding Corn Forum on Delphi Forums, which has been an absolute godsend: 
http://forums.delphiforums.com/n/main.asp?webtag=avoidingcorn&nav=start&prettyurl=%2Favoidingcorn%2F