So Much for the Diet!

I really started out well but then...

After three days, I started getting tummy pains and realized how little fiber I was consuming! A big problem for me as two years ago - jeez, yes it was that long ago - I had a go-around with diverticulitis. The pain was as bad as childbirth! Of course, then I didn't know what it was and ended up in the emergency room. This time, I knew and started to add fiber to the diet. Then I went to see my nurse practitioner for my annual, got on the scale and in the five days of dieting, hadn't lost a single damn pound!

By then, although the fiber was working I was having severe stomach pains so decided that it really wasn't the thing to be doing. The prednisone was obviously stronger than the diet! So I am not doing the strict Atkins thing, more along the lines of what I was eating before which is the anti-inflammatory diet from Dr. Weil.

Along with all this, and I must sound like a real whiner, I have had a continual headache for three weeks and have just felt like a wet dishrag - totally wrung out. Chris called Dr. Tilsen in Newport who he trusts implicitly and I spoke to him about what has been going on. He is an internist - and an excellent one and very perceptive and intuitive (unusual in western medicine!) and he said from what I told him I need to be seeing a rheumatologist at a university hospital. So I am in the process of getting set up at the University of Washington. I didn't know how to approach Dr Lynn, my primary care doctor. It almost felt like I was telling him he wasn't doing a good job, but I really have lost faith in him. But he is not a specialist and I can't go on like this with the "I just don't know" response I get from him each time I go in. I feel he should have been the one to suggest the referral over to UW, not me. I was at my wits end as I didn't know where to go for a referral - when the doctors throw up their hands and say they don't know how the hell am I supposed to know?

Anyway, that is all in the works now and hopefully will get an appointment soon.

Other than that, I go to work and do my job, but with very little enthusiasm. Chris says I am listless which is how I feel. No joy in anything, not excited about anything. Not like me at all. I suppose there is some depression thrown in there too, which doesn't help. I spent the day with Janet and Susan yesterday, helping Janet get her new computer set up with virus protection etc and put Publisher on there for her so she can make her flyers. Those are two very wise women, and I felt like a child there with them talking, I almost felt like it was over my head, no comprehension, like my brain wasn't functioning. Odd.

To give you an idea of how wrung out I feel - my camera, my third arm, has been shut away in a drawer for three weeks, not a single shot taken. :(

This morning, along with my chai, I took a double dose of advil for my headache as a single just doesn't do anything so hope it helps.

It's been gray and rainy the last few days - and with the long weekend, the official start of summer, there are going to be a lot of soggy camp sites! I just have wet and soggy cats!