We all know a Hypochondriac, I mean many people who have had a medical emergency often are said to become obsessed with their health afterward. People often accuse me as one but I have legitimate medical evidence from testing due to symptoms that usually come from these diagnosis. Ok…Lactose intolerance, soy intolerance, gluten intolerance and diverticulitis. The latter was pointed out to me from a colonoscopy for I had no idea. My doctor informed me it usually runs in families and my father has it and I was told I had the beginning of it. As if my food bills couldn’t get any more expensive for finding foods that are lactose free, often point you in the direction of whey or soy.  Well when you’re soy intolerant it becomes more difficult finding foods. So fresh vegetables and fruit… yes only now I have to start scraping out the seeds for diverticulitis and avoid high fiber foods with gluten intolerance. WOW so basically liquids, no happiness or sunshine, I’m down to water and air and grass…. Yes….maybe grass…..does that have any of these I must avoid? Geez

I know there are many people out there with far greater foods challenges out there so the walk away is that I’ll be eating well but yikes. My thinking is over the years after stroke and my stomach was stretched, there must have been plenty of room for all the allergens and with an automatic assumption that the stomach issues I had were something to do with the amount of medicine I have to take. Well since I had the Gastric Sleeve surgery in February of this year, I have noticed I'm sensitive to foods. I had the surgery to eat more. Let me explain: My brain and stomach don't communicate with one another so I will have days when I eat maybe once a day and drink as much to the other extreme of eating everything that isn't bolted down. The body holds on to the calories for it is often tricked to believe it is starving and weight gain happens. I didn’t know that for as hard as I tried to eat right, which I was told by many dieticians I was eating very healthy, the weight continued to grow. The good thing was I quickly lost the weight (60lbs so far) for I was eating more than one meal, I take the one meal and graze on and off all day. I also have drastically cut back on my sugar for I’m not tired for the weight isn’t dragging me down or overheating.

 Most doctors know my stroke only as a bleed to my left hemisphere of the brain, forgetting that I has clots that traveled through my post circulatory system (brainstem, basilar artery) and I spent 6 ½ hours in surgery to manually pull out as many clots as possible by my amazingly fantastic surgical team (((shout out to Jefferson Hospital of Neuroscience in Philadelphia, Penn))) so in fact my stroke affected much more of my brain functions. That has caused me to have so many different alignments.

Basically……. I’m going to cry saying goodbye to my food favorites. ..