Info from the doctor

- On sleep: She recommends adding melatonin and glycine.

- On the diet: She says I am doing very well. She also says I should know quickly if I've erred. Try small amounts of various things and see if the next morning I feel like a truck rolled over me. Also, the antifungal should be keeping the yeast at bay; this level of experimentation is not likely to give me systemic/chronic candidiasis. This is very good news.

- On how to proceed with treatment: I get a new prescription alongside the Biaxin. I don't remember what the name is. She usually adds it six weeks in. Have I mentioned this is getting expensive?

- On results: It's going to take a while before we know whether the Lyme treatment is working. If my foot pain didn't fluctuate but stayed steady, we could expect to see improvement within this first six weeks, but since it jumps all over the map, this will take longer.

- And just out of the blue: she wants me to get allergy-tested for food allergies and for serotonin. I go in for that on the 9th. Sadly, this kills off my sleep meds for the next ten days! I'm supposed to be antihistamine-free for ten days before the test. I've left a note asking her to phone in a prescription for two weeks of Ambien. I am NOT going without sleep meds, not while I'm on Biaxin.

Oops

I just lost The Game.

more detail on diet

My doc said it is totally legal to pull the toppings off a slice of pizza and eat them. When I mentioned the sugar added to pizza sauces, she said "don't worry about" amounts like that. She said the same thing about dark chocolate: if it's over whatever-percentage the handout said (70, I think), I can eat it, whether it's 2g/serving or 12. And I can have "small amounts" of non-recommended foods: a bite or two of ice cream, a small piece carved off a bagel. "It's all about balance" was the way she put it. "Just make sure you have a lot of vegetables too."

This seems to me to be a very silly way to run a diet, but I'm not going to gripe if it gets me pizza toppings and more dark chocolate. This whole thing wasn't my idea anyway. I'm happy to pretend and hand-wave and ignore.

As for experimenting with stuff, I'm going to do a few key things first.
1) Red wine (white is supposedly worse than red, and beer is worse than either)
2) Some hearty serious whole-grain bread, best I can find without immense quantities of white flour *and* without sugar added to it
3) if I pass the alcohol test, FONDUE (held together with starch, but it's *mostly* cheese and white wine, and *most* of the alcohol should have boiled off)

I bet for a good sense of whether these are or are not problems, I'll need to space them out a good bit, possibly repeating once or twice just to make sure I'm not merely having an unusually good or bad day. Or maybe I'll need to have a significant quantity of just one thing to make sure I'd notice a problem. But in a couple of weeks I could imagine knowing whether I can have fondue.

It's quite possible I'll feel fine after any of them. After all, I felt fine before, when a glass of red wine and some heavily buttered popcorn were a perfectly acceptable dinner. I'll send my doc e-mail with the results if I have no problem, and see what she says from there. Ha; there; I promised I'd do that. I know darn well if I didn't think that up *first* I'd be very tempted to just go wild after a few small successes.

SPATULA CITY!

I broke my spatula yesterday. GRRRRR!

Of course it had many good attributes I can no longer find. I even brought the snapped-off handle piece in to work with me so that I could try to find this exact one. (The manufacturer name and product code were embossed into the hard plastic up near the hand end.) Nope. Any product that is well-liked, does its job, and isn't massively annoying to own, will be discontinued. That's the way things work. And since it's probably twenty years old, I realize I was nuts to think I could find it now. Neither this thing nor anything else as convenient is out there any more.

Good Attributes:
- Not made of metal; OK for nonstick pan use.
- Dishwasherable.
- No problems with high heat.
- NOT FLEXIBLE. I know what a scraper is, and I have several, thank you; I want a spatula. You know what a spatula is. You've seen UHF. It is not a scraper. A "turner" would also be okay as long as it's shaped the way I like and not like a big almost-circle.
- No holes in it.
- Total length small enough that it fits in the dishwasher's silverware rack without extending far enough to jam itself into the upper rack and wedge the whole works into immobility. I have no idea what "Good Cook" (Safeway brand utensils?) was thinking, but after they suckered me in with their three-foot-long* slotted spoons, I am NOT buying more utensils from them.

It is not like I have time to go to a store for this, much less several stores, hoping to find something I can stand. It's not often I want a store like SPATULA CITY to exist, but today I honestly wouldn't mind.

* exaggeration**
** but not much