Ok - I haven't written in 8 months. Why? I guess I'm exhausted most of the time. I just don't have time to write about each day's victories and/or failures. I've decided to give you, the reader, a break, and step back a bit. An update once or twice a year should suffice, don't you think?
In January John made tremendous progress, moving from two electives to four classes, primarily academic (albeit special ed). We received glowing reports at his parent teacher conference in March. He was functioning in the school system, thank God! Maybe, after 8 long years, we were finally on the home stretch. We could go on Oprah and tell the world about our long struggle, and how it all ended happily ever after. But not so fast. Don't call Harpo Studios just yet.
As April turned into May, John grew worse each week. We had to pick him up from school once a week, then twice a week, then almost every day. The recurring nightmare had returned. His principal was ready to send him back to the Max program, but she literally ran out of time as the school year came to an end. For want of paperwork, John narrowly escaped a return to Alcatraz. But this is merely a reprieve, isn't it? This child, who can't make it through a day of middle school, is scheduled to attend high school, with fewer support services, and zero tolerance for bad behavior. Are we having fun yet?
Why was he doing well in March, and why did he crash in May? I deliberately ratcheted the carbs down in May, hoping that would help. And he's not sneaking, like he was last year. I checked his room, the garage, and other hiding places. And I don't smell anything on his breath. It's not a carb issue - it's something else.
During the summer, I think I figured it out. As usual, it begins with his noncompliance. Eating the occasional school lunch was risky enough, but I told him, again and again, "Drink nothing but water or tea." I found out, through one of his buddies, that John drank some kind of artificial low-carb juice every day. "Hey," he defended later, "It didn't have any carbs." No - but it has just about everything else. I repeat one of my many mantras. "If you had just one problem, we would have figured it out years ago. You probably react to many different things."
At the same time, I was solving another mystery. Like many dieters, John was doing an end run around carbs with various fake sugars, such as splenda and nutrasweet. Not very often, just once every two or three days. Sometimes he'd do fine with these, and sometimes he had a horrible reaction. The latter was especially true for diet drinks. I thought he just took in a larger quantity of nutrasweet, or I ascribed it to the chaos of 100 other variables moving independently. I just didn't know. It never occurred to me to look for something else in the diet soda, something besides the fake sugar. There is something in every diet soda, and even some regular sodas, such as Sprite. It's also present in most commercial juices, processed cheese, jelly/jam, many popcycles (regular or diet), lots of dairy products, condiments, sauces (including soy sauce), and even the occasional baked good. It's everywhere! Do you know what it is? The preservative sorbic acid, or its salt form K-sorbate. Or the preservative benzoic acid, or its salt form K-benzoate. Benzoate and sorbate look like different molecules, but they really aren't. The first is a ring, but if you cut it open and lay it flat, it becomes the second. I'm going to assume the entire class of compounds is bad, and try to keep them out of his diet. We switched from american cheese (he use to eat about 6 slices per day) over to block cheese. And we started looking for sorbate free mayonaise, benzoate free pure fruit popcycles, etc. This seems to help a lot as the summer rolls along, but it's not everything. He still has some really bad days. He still doesn't look like he can function in high school. We'll find out next month.