Elizabeth, my youngest daughter, has contracted strep four times in the last 12 months. I hate giving her all those antibiotics, and now her doctor is talking about a tonsillectomy.
Even when she is well she isn't really well. She often wakes up with a stomach ache or head ache. She lies around in front of the tube, then wants McDonalds for lunch. Of course she's all better by 3:00, ready to go out and play. The psychologists would have a field day with this one.
"It may be subconscious - she's creating the problem herself. You see that don't you? She just wants to be with you, or maybe something is bothering her at school. Have you talked to her about this?"
Actually we haven't, because the problem is not in her head. She really does wake up ill, especially on Monday morning, and it can take most of the day for her to recover.
Her emotions are out of whack too. It's subtle, and you might not notice it from afar, but little things make her sad, or frustrated, or both. She wasn't like this before. She was always a happy girl, one of the happiest kids I've ever known.
Here's another piece of the puzzle. Elizabeth is clearing her throat a lot lately. She's done this before, a couple years ago, but then it went away. At the time I attributed it to MSG. She was eating frozen dinners with MSG almost every day, and when she got tired of them, and stopped eating them, her symptoms went away. Well - the clog is back, and it's very distracting to those around her, especially at school.
I know from experience that constant throat clearing is a classic reaction to food or food additives. Apparently Elizabeth has joined the rest of us mere mortals. Welcome aboard; looks like we all react to something.
Elizabeth would like to stay above the fray, eating anything she likes, but last Saturday made that impossible. Her reaction was so severe she could hardly breathe. We need to figure this out, and fix it, fast!
John and Mary are almost gloating. For four years they've watched Elizabeth eat pizza and candy and pop, while they ate boiled chicken and green beans and rice. For four years Elizabeth has gone to friends' houses without a care in the world - no special food arrangements, no uncomfortable situations. For four years Elizabeth has gone on field trips with her class and eaten, well, whatever! McDonalds, KFC, Taco Bell - whatever. This was a constant source of frustration for John and Mary. Don't get me wrong; these three are about as close as any siblings I've ever known. You'd swear they were raised together from birth. They play together, and help each other, and care about each other. But there is always going to be tension when one can do anything she likes while the others are severely restricted. Now it seems the shoe is on the other foot.
Trouble is, we don't know what Elizabeth reacts to, at least not yet. We're starting from scratch. Fortunately I've learned a valuable lesson over the past four years. Natural foods are horses, and additives are zebras.
Perhaps you've heard about horses and zebras. When an attending physician takes a new resident under his wing he will often give the following advice.
"When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. When you see certain symptoms, think about the common diseases and illnessses that are prevalent in this region of the country. You've just graduated from medical school, and your head is full of all sorts of exotic tropical diseases that you've read about in your text books, but don't go there. It's just the flu! Those hoofbeats are coming from a horse, not a zebra."
Natural foods cause many more reactions that manmade additives. When you hear hoofbeats, think about wheat, corn, dairy, soy, eggs, nuts, and shellfish. Additives and preservatives are zebras, microbial infections are Siberian tigers, and amines and salicylates are emus. (However, recent articles in reputable journals suggest bacterial imbalances may be horses after all.)
As I hold my youngest daughter in my lap, and try to calm her down so she can breathe, I hear hoofbeats. I'm going to look for horses first, and zebras and emus later (if I must). I realize we have an emu and a tiger living in our own home, but I still think it's a horse. I'm not going to worry about red#40, and I'm not going to count carbohydrates, at least not right away. We're going to cut out wheat, corn, or dairy, and see what happens.
As I start work on Elizabeth's diet I have another advantage; I know her genetic history. This puts us half way around the board. "Advance token to Illinois Ave." I react to corn and my wife reacts to dairy. Elizabeth has genes from both of us, so it's a coin toss. well not quite. She ate a truck load of corn last Saturday, so let's start with that. Yes, she also ate wheat and dairy and soy, and lots of additives, but I still think it's the corn.
24 hours into her new diet, and Elizabeth is frustrated to tears. She only likes a handful of foods, if you can call them foods, and they all contain pretty much everything. I told her that this was an easy diet, especially compared to the regimens that John and Mary have endured, but that didn't cut any ice. She wants her six comfort foods, over and over again, and she doesn't want to start reading ingredient lists. I don't blame her, but that doesn't change the hand she's been dealt. She needs to be on a diet, starting today, and there's very little room for compromise. I just hope corn is the answer. I don't want to take on another four-year project. I'm pretty optimistic though. I think this is a horse, not an emu, so we should be able to track it down pretty quickly.
Unfortunately soy is in everything, and Elizabeth is a very picky eater. She only likes three homemade meals and five restaurant meals. I'm not talking steak and potatoes; I'm talking chicken strips and fries, pizza, onion rings, etc, all cooked in soy oil. That's what she craves, and if she doesn't get it, the tears flow. She just doesn't like anything else.
I'm not going to be able to prove or disprove this theory until summer. The school lunches have too many variables. Every lunch has some soy, either a little or a lot. There's no way to know. She won't eat anything cold, like a sandwich, and the prepared foods she might take, and heat up in the school microwave, all contain soy - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There's know way to know. So for now, I'm letting her eat most of the school lunches, and I'm trying to keep her off of soy at home. She still clears her throat and coughs, but the major symptoms are gone. She wakes up well every morning, and hasn't missed a day of school. No strep, no head aches, no stomach aches.
If soy is the culprit, and if her sensitivity gets any worse, she may not be able to eat the school lunches at all. This is ironic, since John and Mary have started eating the school lunches again. There are a few lunches with too many legumes or carbs, but most lunches can be squeezed into our carbohydrate budget, especially if John skips the cooky or breadstick or whatever. After four difficult years of packing lunches for John and Mary, we may wind up packing lunches for Elizabeth. You never know where this story will lead.