#also can’t have cheese but not in the dairy allergy way cause no even with that being an uncommon one it’s still too easy | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aggressive-positivity-network · 4 years ago

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Spy and a very laid back love interest who is always bugging them to "just relax" and "chill a little bit"?

Oh god, this would be the best dynamic EVER. Spy would learn to chill and the partner would learn to care. It’s just...so wholesome...

Non-Emergencies:

Spy would simultaneously be trying to keep up his face-of-stone persona while also hyperventilating.

“Do...is the screw under the sofa? Perhaps next to the TV stand? If we don’t use every piece it may fall apart. Sacre...do you even care at all?!”

You raise your eyebrows. “Okay, you know what, let’s hear it.”

“Pardon?”

“If we don’t find the screw, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“YOU KILL YOURSELF ON THIS DEATH TRAP DISGUISED AS A SOFA!”

“How?”

You got him there. He thought for a while, not wanting to admit he was wrong. While he was pondering, you lift up your leg and you find the lost screw. You had been sitting on it.

“Looking for this?”

Spy snatched the screw away from you, cursing under his breath. You can’t help but snicker.

“Listen, if furniture killed, IKEA would have gone out of business long ago.”

“Oui, oui, you are hilarious. Hon hon hon.”

“Aw, you’re so cute when you get all worried about me.”

“Go to hell.”

“Only if I can take you with me.”

After Work:

A lot of times, Spy will come home from jobs absolutely exhausted. He usually finds comfort in you. The Frenchman has told you when he was particularly tired that you “smell like home.” If you are still up, he’ll sit next to you on the couch and eventually fall asleep on your shoulder.

However, every once in a while, he will walk through the door, his eyes wide, his body shaking, and his hair a mess. After those nights, he is always jumpy and anxious for the next week or so.

During those periods, you make sure to give him some extra TLC. You take over meal duties for a while, you make sure to watch shows that don’t have gunfire, screaming, or combat, and you make sure to pour positive thoughts back into his life.

“Spy, I saw the cutest Pomeranian! I know you’ve said you always wanted one.”

“My barista was French, and her name is Mimi! I may have a bit of competition...”

“I saw a double rainbow on the way home! My grandpa always said that double rainbows meant a happy marriage - I guess he was right!”

You’d know he’d be feeling better when you’d come home to the smell of camomile and disinfectant...he always cleaned and made tea when he was in a good mood.

It was also his way of “making it up to you.” He’s always embarrassed about his episodes, but you always secretly like loving on him a bit.

He never let you treat him this romantically otherwise - he felt it was his responsibility to swoon.

But, despite his aversion to being spoiled, he always seems to have a smile on his face when you surprise him with gifts and loving words.

Problems With Being Assertive:

Even though you are as kind as you can to everyone, sometimes kindness isn’t enough. But due to your large family and little personal time growing up, you are a little too forgiving when it comes to how people treat you.

Spy, however, is intolerant of any disrespect. He has scared off many telemarketers and belligerent Girl Scouts with his withering looks and sharp words.

One night, you both were at a restaurant, and you ordered a salad to eat before the main course, as this establishment was known for taking their sweet time with dishes.

Twenty minutes later, your salad arrives, absolutely covered in cheddar cheese. Because you’re lactose intolerant, you had ordered no cheese AT ALL, but your salad had so much cheese you couldn’t even see the top of the lettuce.

Now, Spy has an almost scary memory, and knows exactly what you ordered, but he doesn’t say anything except that you should probably ask for another salad.

“This is their job, mon chéri. If they did not do it correctly, that is not your fault.”

You finally do pluck up your courage and ask the waiter to get a salad without cheese.

They are reluctant, saying that wasn’t what you ordered the first time, but a glare from Spy sent them scurrying back to the kitchen. You get a little irritated.

“Honey, they’re trying their best. Working at a restaurant is hard enough already without remaking something I didn’t have to eat.”

Spy raised his eyebrows. “Something you didn’t have to eat? That you expressly asked for? At a restaurant?”

“You know what I mean.”

The salad comes back and it is very obviously the same salad but with handfuls of cheese picked off. There was still quite a bit left.

Spy is now visibly angry, and you look to him for help, but he shakes his head. He wants you to deal with this on your own. You can’t rely on his social bravery forever. He just gestures to the waiter, who is already starting to walk away, and smiles.

You take a deep breath.

“I’m really sorry, but there’s still cheese on it...I can’t...I can’t eat it.”

The waiter rolls his eyes. “If we make your salad again, you’ll have to pay for all three.

“There’s...only two.”

“You sent it back, we remade it, and now you want me to remake it again. Three.”

“But then why did you add cheese this time?”

“You ordered it.”

“I did not order cheese on my salad! I am really, really lactose intolerant! And...and I ordered no cheese so I wouldn’t be throwing up all weekend! So why would I order cheese?”

“You should have informed us of any allergies you had.”

“I did! By asking for no cheese! What, do I need a doctor’s note to eat here?!”

The waiter started to say something else, but you cut him off.

“It wouldn’t even be that big a deal if your food didn’t take an hour and a half to get here! I haven’t eaten since breakfast, because all my orders got backed up! I just wanted a salad! A salad to eat while your gourmet chef put your gourmet dishes in a gourmet microwave! I thought I could come in, talk with my beautiful husband, and eat a little more than I should so I could konk out watching Nailed It! when I got home! I don’t want to argue with you! I just want a damn salad!”

You strike the table, causing your silverware to clink together. You put your head in your hands and massage your temples for a few seconds.

“So. A salad. With no cheese. Not extra, not some, not picked off. None.”

Spy grinned, impressed.

“I would listen to them if I were in your position, mon ami. You have cleaning duty tonight, no?”

The waiter nodded slowly.

“Let’s just say I have to book a hotel when they accidentally eat dairy. It even set off the fire alarm once, didn’t it, dearest?”

You cock an eyebrow, but you agree to play along. He didn’t have to take it that far.

The waiter blushed scarlet and retreated back to the kitchen. He didn’t say anything all night, and followed each of your instructions to a T.

Once you got back in the car, you smacked Spy on the shoulder.

“Set off the fire alarm?! Seriously?”

“I have been lying all day, mon amour. Forgive me if I wasn’t exactly up to snuff this evening.”

“We can never go here again! Ever! I’ll be known as the guy who almost blew up the bathroom!”

“It isn’t such a loss...I much prefer dining in anyway.”

There was a silence. Suddenly, Spy wrapped his arms around you and kissed you so suddenly you almost fell over. He pulled back after a while, taking his mask off.

“You are so irresistible when you’re angry...”

You giggled. “Did I find a sweet spot?”

“Oui. Most definitely.”

“We’re not going to go to the movies, are we?”

“Unless you prefer the smell of stale popcorn to get you in the mood.”

“You had better make it up to me after tonight.”

“Oh, I will, mon chou. I will.”

**************

I know that this is a little shorter than usual, but I wanted to leave a little more to the imagination. Besides, some bigger HCs are coming up, and I don’t want you to be reading a novel every time I answer a request.

Call this a Non-canon Novella!

#tf2 #tf2 fandom #tf2 ask blog #tf2 headcanons #tf2 headcanon #tf2 spy #tf2 x reader #spy x reader #answered ask #answered request #request

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1heartfanfics · 5 years ago

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Prompt suggestion❤️: kaiser, Hazel, Nathan and Jackson are hanging out at a cabin for the weekend when Nathan starts to get sick, he puts off telling them how he feels until he can’t bear it anymore and starts throwing up. They all help take care of him.

OMG thanks so much, I love this one!! I’m a sucker for group fics and I actually don’t think I’ve written hardly any, which is crazy. Also, I kind of turned it into a little joke because they’ve got so many allergies between them lol (Jackson can’t have dairy, Kaiser can’t have gluten, Nathan can’t have corn or sesame)

“Hey, you guys want to head in and start on dinner?” Kaiser asked, pulling himself out of the water to sit on the deck.

“Sounds good, I’m starving,” Hazel agreed.

“What are we making tonight?” Jackson asked, getting out of the lake as well.

“How about spaghetti,” Hazel suggested, swimming over to the dock to get out herself. She walked over to where Nathan was lounging in a deck chair to grab her towel. He wasn’t a big fan of being in the water so he’d opted to do some tanning instead.

“Gluten,” Kaiser shook his head. “We could do enchilladas.”

“Corn,” Hazel shook her head, glancing at Nathan, who was making a face at the suggestion. “Potato soup?”

“Dairy,” Jackson shook his head.

Huh. This was going to be more difficult than they thought.

“I could grill up some hamburgers. Jackson just won’t use cheese and I won’t use a bun,” Kaiser shrugged, wrapping himself up in a towel.

“Nathan will probably have to do no bun as well cause I think they’re sesame buns,” Jackson said.

“That’s fine,” Nathan mumbled, pushing himself up from the chair carefully and wrapping his own towel around himself, mostly to cover up how bloated he’d realized his stomach was. He hadn’t been feeling good since lunch but figured it would just get better if he just lounged around and took it easy, but in fact the opposite had happened. He felt worse than earlier.

Sitting in the hot sun had made the upset in his stomach turn to nausea, sweat prickling on his skin and making him feel too hot and too cold at the same time. Maybe that was the fever talking, he was pretty sure he had one now.

“You sure?” Hazel asked, leaning against his shoulder. He cringed, hoping she couldn’t feel the fever. She’d probably just assume if was from the sun though, he supposed.

“Yeah, lettuce burger is fine with me,” he shrugged, biting back a gag at the thought of eating anything. This was bad, this was really bad. The last place he wanted to be sick was at this cabin in the middle of nowhere with a group of people. But there was nothing he could do about it now, he was definitely sick.

He followed the rest of them inside, hoping as a last ditch effort that the air conditioning inside would make him feel better. Maybe lunch had just upset his stomach and now he was overheated? Probably not. But it was worth a shot.

After going inside he went to the bathroom, splashing some cool water on his face and wiping down his chest and his arms with a wet rag to cool him off. It didn’t help. Not enough anyway. It did feel good to hold something cold to his stomach though, which was definitely bloated, pressing against the waistband of his swim trunks.

Nathan exited the bathroom and headed to the bedroom him and Hazel were staying in while they were at the cabin. He figured that the rest of them were in the kitchen starting on dinner, probably annoyed that he hadn’t stuck around to help. He couldn’t find himself to care at the moment though, he was starting to feel really bad.

As he walked down the hallway, he found that his vision was spinning, making him even more queasy. He hugged his belly as he stumbled into their room, arm pressed against the wall for support. To his surprise, however, Hazel was sitting on the bed looking at her phone. He immediately straightened up as much as he could, fighting dizziness and nausea.

“Hey, there you are!” Hazel looked up, smiling when she saw him. The smile quickly faded when she saw how flushed he looked. She’d thought it was just from being out int he sun, but something had told her that it wasn’t just that.

“I was in the bathroom,” he mumbled, his jaw feeling too heavy to speak.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Nathan didn’t answer. There was a lump in his throat and his tummy was squeezing inside of him. He was afraid of what would happen if he opened his mouth. “Baby what’s wrong?” Hazel got up from the bed, quickly moving to Nathan’s side. She gently grabbed his arm to steady him just in time for him to pitch forward and vomit all over the floor, narrowly missing both of their feet.

“Oh jeez, okay hon, you’re alright,” Hazel stuttered for a moment, obviously taken off guard, before regaining her composure. She wrapped an arm around him to keep him upright as he hunched forwards, continuing to gag up their lunch. She could feel the heat radiating off of him, and it definitely was not just from being outside. He had a fever for sure.

“S-sorry, I couldn’t m-move, I-” Nathan cried once the heaves finally tapered off, tears falling down his flushed cheeks.

“Aw sweetie, it’s not a big deal, I’ll clean it up no problem, come here,” she shushed him, pulling him into her arms.

Nathan let out a sob, “I don’t feel good!” He pressed his face into her shoulder, wrapping his arms tightly around her waist.

“I’m so sorry Nath,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his cheek and rubbing her hands up and down his back until he calmed down. Then she carefully pulled him away from the mess and led him over to sit on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he sniffed, “I didn’t want to ruin the weekend.”

“Don’t apologize, it’s not your fault. I’m just sorry you don’t feel well. I’ll take care of you though okay?” she told him, wiping the tears off of his cheeks with her thumb.

She walked over to Nathan’s weekend bag and pulled out a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, tossing them onto the bed for him to change out of his swim suit.

“I’m gonna go tell Kaiser and Jaz that you aren’t feeling good and get some stuff to clean up with. You change into something more comfy and lay down to relax, I’ll be right back,” Hazel said, exiting the room and pulling the door shut on her way out.

Nathan sighed, hanging his head in his hands. He couldn’t believe he’d just puked all over the floor of Kaiser’s parents cabin in front of his girlfriend. His tummy was still churning, so he pressed a hand to it, feeling his shorts digging into the underside of his belly. Hazel was right, he should change. He carefully put on the boxers and the shirt then crawled miserably under the covers, feeling suddenly cold.

Hazel came back and checked on him a moment later, kissing his forehead, before moving to clean the floor. When she was finished she grabbed the trash can from the bathroom and placed it beside Nathan on the floor, just in case. When she sat down at the edge of the bed to check on him again, she found that he was fast asleep, arms cradling his sickly tummy.

Good, she thought, maybe he just needs to sleep it off.

#tw vomit #vomit trigger warning #emeto #stomach flu #tummy ache #upset tummy #bloated tummy #sick nathan #caretaker hazel #nathan and hazel #kaiser #jackson

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vands38 · 4 years ago

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things i wish someone told me about coeliac disease (UK edition)

apparently some doctors are still not telling coeliacs what they actually need to know so here’s some fun facts --

*coeliac disease is likely to go undiagnosed if you don’t have digestive symptoms. for a lot of folks, their first symptoms are odd things like weight loss, bloating, mouth ulcers etc that take ages for doctors to correctly diagnose as coeliac disease. I know someone whose only sign was tingling in her fingers (nerve problems are a Thing sometimes). I don’t wanna freak folks out but check this list of symptoms and if you’re worried, ask your doc for a blood test to check for coeliac disease. I went in and out of my docs for years with various symptoms (mostly from the anaemia) and no one caught it until I was finally having noticeable digestive trouble.

* coeliac disease an autoimmune disease. not an allergy. not an intolerance. when you eat gluten, your gut just screams NOPE and throws everything out of there.

* this means if you keep eating gluten you will have serious long-term health problems because your gut can't absorb shit

* as I mentioned, anaemia is one of these associated health problems. a lot of people have this at diagnosis b/c your gut hasn’t been absorbing the nutrients it needs. it leaves you very weak and tired, and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

* long-term anaemia / malnutrition causes so many fucking health problems I can't list them all. basically, if your body sucks, there's a good chance it's a side-effect of your coeliac disease going undiagnosed. I got shitty joints and a shitty heart and shitty bones and godknowswhatelse and every time my doc is like "hey, guess what? it’s coeliac disease!"

* you know what a common side effect is? LACTOSE INTOLERANCE. this is because, once again, your gut hates you from all that gluten you've been killing it with, so it starts to muck around and kick out other things too. but good news! most of the time this is reversible!!! lay off any lactose for a couple of months, reintroduce it to your diet slowly, and you -- like me -- might be a-ok

*some folks with coeliac disease can’t digest oats either as they contain a similar protein. I found that I was kinda squiffy with them at first but as soon as my gut had calmed down I was a-ok with GF oats (this is good b/c 99% of good GF biscuits are made with oat flour, RIP to everyone that can’t eat them)

* so... your bones are probably fucked. if you were diagnosed early and your doctors are on it, you might be okay but for a lot of people it means osteopenia, and further down the line, osteoporosis (meaning it's v easy to break bones). you need to be eating, like, double the regular amount of calcium every day. most people are put on calcium tablets with combined vitamin D (to help absorb the calcium) but even on top of that, you need to be getting a lot in your diet. If you're still lactose intolerant then switch to lacto-free versions of dairy products or eat tofu like there's no tomorrow. It's super important that you get enough.

* relatedly, bone health!!! You should be doing MODERATE impact exercises like jogging to strengthen the bones but nothing high-impact like tennis. load-bearing exercises are good too. here’s some examples (in detail) given to me by the rheumatology dept

* people have different sensitivity levels. in the UK, certified gluten-free products have to be 20 parts per million or less, but in the US this is 100! marmite lives somewhere between these two and can cause some coeliacs to have a reaction. please be aware when you eat international gluten-free foods that they might have more parts per million than your body is used to

* because you're super sensitive to gluten, not only do you need to check the bold allergens on the ingredients, but the small print too. it might say "made in a factory that handles gluten" or "may contain traces of gluten" and that’s a no-go

* similarly, be careful in restaurants. Apparently it's still perfectly legal for restaurants to say a dish is "gluten free" and then put your nice GF bread in the same fucking toaster as regular bread and have you shitting your pants for days. Just because the ingredients are GF doesn't mean they're cooking it in an allergen-conscious manner. If its not a Coeliac UK certified restaurant, always ask about their methods. Is that milkshake made in a GF blender? Is your fry-up cooked in a separate pan? The first time I got glutened after my diagnosis it was because my GF naan bread shared a tray with a regular one. A lot of places won't even fucking think about this stuff.

* if you're in a gluten-eating household, you've got a big expense coming up. you need to buy a GF toaster at the very least and I would recommend also a separate baking tray (because pizzas, garlic breads etc stick to that shit like no tomorrow) and a saucepan (or anything else that regularly contains pasta/noodles/etc). You'll also need a separate bread knife and board. Separate butter. Separate strainer if you're the type to drain your pasta. Line anything suspicious (e.g.your sandwich toaster, a communal baking tray) with baking parchment. Don’t use bare rungs in your oven or hob. And buy separate spreads and condiments, unless your household is very well trained in not dipping their crumb-covered knives into those things. I've even got separate plates, kitchen utensils, and cutlery. It seems extreme but I haven't had a cross-contamination incident since. Just think: has gluten touched this? And if so, do your best to minimise the risk.

* living GF is expensive long-term too. GF bread costs twice as much as regular bread. Restaurants often charge extra for GF alternatives. I had to switch from having toast in the morning to cereal because it's much more reasonably priced. I eat more fruit than I ever have before just because GF snacks cost so much. I used to have breakfast bars lol say goodbye to that shit unless you wanna be broke

* things I didn't realise I couldn't eat: crisps (a lot of your standard crisps are made with ??? production methods), candied nuts (most of these are made in factories that handle gluten), soy sauce, strawberry laces and a whole bunch of fave sweets (contain wheat starch to bind them - check this list for safe sweets), marmite (you can buy a GF yeast extract that is only 50% worse than the original)

*good food you actually can eat: most cadburys but not most nestle, GF beer which tastes exactly the same, schar pretzels are actually the shit, so are their BBQ pringles and those little chocolate bars with hazelnuts, Morrisons free from frozen mini hash browns will cure your depression, M&S do these bacon tortilla rolls which... OH BOY. Quiche alternatives are pretty damn good but I've yet to find a pizza that doesn't make me want to cry.

*speaking of supermarkets... Morrisons stock a good range of stuff and tend to have everything in one aisle, M&S have many yummy (and expensive) treats, Sainsbury's has good own brand things including bread, Tesco's are fairly decent and stock a lot of baking things, ASDA are the king of GF cake, if you're still lacto-free then Waitrose sell LF cheese including halloumi, and check your your local hippy food store because I found the best goddamn bread in mine (Incredible Bakery Company - you are £4.50 a loaf but I have no regrets)

*party risks: if there's a BBQ, insist that your things go first or have a separate BBQ, or, if worse comes to worse, just eat cold snacks. (Beware of sausages! Many aren't GF!) If its a chip and dip situation, either everything has to be GF (easily done) or have your own dip. BUFFETS ARE LITERALLY OUR WORST NIGHTMARE. the amount of coeliacs I know that have been glutened at one are INSANE. even if those tasty treats are labelled 'gluten free' they've probably be contaminated. everything at a goddamn buffet is contaminated. Dinner party? Well meaning friends will want to cook for you but unless their kitchen is set up as above, it's safer to bring your own food -- if you're very lucky, you will have friends who take the time to learn about allergens and will clean every item in their kitchen before cooking and serving an entire GF meal. these friends are to be treasured -- nay, worshipped.

*fast food. there’s no good way to put this but you’re never having that guilty pleasure 2am burger again. mcdonalds fries are miraculously GF though. (a lot of takeaways recycle oil so even if the ingredients are GF it’s often not safe but mcdonalds always use a separate fryer for chips). indian takeaway is great as most dishes don’t contain gluten. on the flip side, you’ll only be able to have about 5 items on the chinese menu (soy sauce is in everything, yo) so be prepared to learn those 5 items by heart. dominoes do Coeliac UK certified GF pizza!!! (buuuuut not during covid). chains like pizza express have got our back and will even serve you GF doughballs

*coeliac UK are your best friend! most of the things I’ve mentioned are described in detail on their website. they also have a barcode scanner app that will tell you if foods are safe, and they have a restaurant guide, and useful things like translation guides for when you go abroad.

That's all I've got right now but hmu with any questions or corrections. Take care of yourself, folks. <3

#coeliac disease #celiac disease #gluten free #info post #allergens #i just could not see another incorrect comment on the coeliac uk facebook page without doing something #i'm sorry #i'm well aware this is of interest to approx three followers #but #someone might need to hear all this #because my god i definitely did when i got diagnosed #long post

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onceuponatimewithhaleigh · 4 years ago

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Time to catch up!

I'm so sorry I kinda vanished! Well, I didn't kind of vanish. I straight poofed. So I'm going to catch you guys up on what's happened since the start of August. Quite a lot has gone on, and I needed to kinda - I don't really know? Mentally I was just gone. Like August happened? I don't remember it. But anyhow here we go!

My Skin Spot:

Not cancer! My doctor so politely told me "Sometimes spots just pop up as we... get older." So. Guess I'm just gonna have some serious blemishes the older I get. Haha! I mean, not going to lie, I'm salty about it. But I'd rather be 'getting old' than have cancer. So that's all good!

Meeting with Dr. Lak:

Doctor Lak is my future surgeon for my gastric bypass. She's really really nice. Super friendly and super supportive. She got me all setup - so I have a slue of appointments made. Due to my insurance, I have to see a dietitian for six months consecutively before I can have the surgery. I also have to pass a nicotine test. So - I have to quit smoking ASAP. Which, I need to anyhow. (more on my smoking at the end lol) but overall she was absolutely fantastic!

College(Part One):

Before classes started I talked to my amazing Academic Advisor, Kathrine - and I told her some of my interests and my plans for after college. And we both kinda poked around at my minoring in Photography. To me, that wasn't really enough, so I am now a double major!

OBGYN:

I haven't said anything here, but I have plans in becoming a mother as soon as my health permits. Now I am not in a relationship, nor do I plan to be. I want to be a single mother. Some people think I'm absolutely bat-shit crazy for that. But I think, for me that is the best thing. I have an extremely supportive family, and I have zero doubt in my mind that my child will be loved as much and so much more than they'd ever possibly need! The issue here was A. my weight. B. my family has a history of fertility issues. C. I have PCOS. D. I don't have a partner haha, Kinda need two to tango ;) That all being said, I had mentioned this to my OBGYN, who retired randomly on me in March(with no notice - canceled pre-existing appointments, and with no doctors accepting new patients). I had been telling him about bad pains I'd been having for a while, and he never really listened to me or made any move to investigate. I did my own research, as well as spoke to people about it - and thought I may have Endometriosis. I brought my thoughts to him. He shrugged and said "That's probably it." and made Z E R O effort to figure it out. After three months of pain being horrible to the point sometimes when I was driving, I'd have a flare-up and I'd have to pull over because the pain was so bad I couldn't breathe or see. Then he retired. Then there were no doctors accepting anyone new. So. FINALLY - August 10th I get into a new OBGYN, Dr. Curtis. The first impression was "dudes young and super hip this is gonna be weird..." I'm weird when it comes to doctors, but doctors messing around down there I'm even weirder LOL. I feel like if my OB was a woman there's some weird competition 'Mines prettier...' I have no idea don't judge me xD I told him my wants and things and he told me sadly some older doctors just don't care. they're very black and white. And he was spot on. He told me I probably don't have endometriosis. Put me back on birth control, told me to have the gastric surgery, and then he'd get me in for an exam, and he'd get me to a fertility clinic. He supported me 100% in wanting to become a single mother. He did say that I was the youngest he'd ever seen himself, but he had no issues moving forward with me doing that. Told me a year after surgery, he'd get me to a clinic and we'd get me a baby xD

Dietitian:

My dietitian's name is Andrea, and guys, I love her. She is so goofy as scatterbrained it makes me giggle! I learned a lot during that call though! (all my appointments with gastric have been on the computer/phone) So, this hospital does post-surgery stuff differently than any others in the area, and they've found it's got the best results. So after surgery, I'd usually be on a liquid diet for 6 weeks. Which is standard. Nope! Not here! After surgery, I'll be on a pure protein diet. Not shakes- PUREAED MEAT. How gross right? Meat slushie anyone? Gag lol She goes "Everyone seems to love the pureed eggs" and I literally gagged in the call xD This is gonna be the death of me. Another thing that had me completely shook was that with a stomach the size of an EGG after surgery, I still have to drink 64oz of water a day. She said I can only drink 2oz at a time. So I basically have to take a shot of water every 10 minutes ALL DAY LONG. But! I can't drink anything at all for 30 minutes BEFORE I eat, I can't drink WHILE EATING(which I have to eat 3/4 a cup over 45 minutes-_-), and I can't drink shit for 30 minutes AFTER I eat. So. This shit's gonna be wild man. I'm excited but anxious as hell. And for the rest of my life, I'll be taking vitamin supplements.

Weight:

Currently, my weight is 417lbs

College(Part Two):

So. Friday(Aug. 28th) before the term starts, I have a massive breakdown. That Monday the first week the course was available to look at. We could submit anything, but we could go in and do the work and submit it later. Well. I got in there in my Introduction to Liberal Arts(IDS-100), and boooyyy did I overreact. :) I freaked out. I got overwhelmed because my IDS-100 professor is a very longwinded man. The email I had gotten made everything seem way way more complicated than necessary. And I basically went into spiral mode.

'is a college education reallllyyyy that important?'

'What's the point?'

'I'm gonna fail anyhow, so why try?'

'My family will think I'm a failure...'

'I shouldn't even try, so I don't fail.'

A whole slue of shit thoughts went through my head, and I took it, man. That little demon in my brain just bitching "Never good enough. Not smart enough! Failure." And I sat there and took it like a little bitch. I got so bad I called my advisor, Good ole Kathrine, and LUCKY FOR ME; she was busy and didn't answer. I had the ability to talk to another advisor, but I didn't wanna sob into a stranger's ear so LOL. I called my dad when I was balls deep into a panic attack, and he came down and talked me out of it, and then told me he'd sit with me when I do classwork so he can help if I need it. Which, It's not really that I need help, I was worried about my comprehension of the information I read in class. Because I'm a very visual learner and one of those that talks shit out. And being online, I'm alone in my room so uh lol But yeah. He talked me down, got me all calmed down. Then the next day, my advisor called and asked why I'd called and she apologized for not being available and I laughed and told her straight "It's better you were busy, Cause I'd have dropped out." and she was shocked. Told her all of what happened and what was going on in my head and she told me she was gonna set up weekly appointments with me after each module opens. a new module opens every Monday. and she said she was gonna call me every Tuesday. I went on a spiel about how I feel ridiculous cause I'm being a burden. And she squashed that thought hella fast. So long story short. I am so blessed to have a support system between my dad and my wonderful advisor Kathrine. Lol

Boooo:

I gained a new allergy and lost an old one. I have no idea how that worked. But. No longer allergic to Soy. But now have a TERRIBLE reaction to all dairy products... Which fuckin blows because I live in Wisconsin, and I L O V E cheese. -_- Cheese hates me. :(BYE GUYS!

Whoops!

Forgot about the smoking bit, this is an Edit lmao Basically - TOTALLY thought I could drop smoking cold turkey cause that's how I'd done it every time I'd quit smoking before. Welp. Not this time :) I was a raging bitch, and a HORRIBLE migraine that was so bad I couldn't do ANYTHING. And to top it all off, I had a panic attack lol So. It's the time of year I usually start to quit anyhow. I'm so weird. I'm a seasonal smoker. Living in Wisconsin I am NOT keen on smoking in below zero temperatures in winter. I'd like to keep my fingers. This year I started smoking earlier than usual because I was out of state where freezing winter temperatures were a minimum of like, 37*F and I'm like *cackles in Wisconsinite* CHILDS PLAY!!! So, I started smoking again in December lol Anyway, now- my dad's in control of my smokes. He gives me my daily allowance in a ziplock bag which made me laugh so fucking hard because just like I actually said to him "I feel like you're my dealer and I'm sneaking something naughty!" lol Right now I'm aloud 10 a day. Which is probably 3-5 less than I usually smoke a day. So. I'm kinda feeling it. But my dads controlling them. So this should be fun. :) That's all! Bye guys!

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lovemesomesurveys · 5 years ago

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When was the last time you ate out for lunch? A few weeks ago at Disneyland. What color was the last swimsuit you wore? I don’t even remember. It’s been several years since I’ve worn a swimsuit. Is your dream job attainable? I don’t have a dream job. :/ Have you ever been to an auto show? No. Have you ever wondered how flies get away from being swatted so quickly? They’re able to fly.

Have you read a newspaper today? No, I don’t read the newspaper. I get my news online or on TV. What was the last thing you cooked for dinner? I don’t cook dinner, but I do make a bowl of ramen every night. It’s my late night food. Do you live in the city/town you were born in? Yeah. Can you remember the last song you listened to? Say So by Doja Cat. Do you have to go to school or work tomorrow? Nope. I’m done with school and I don’t have a job. Have you consumed dairy today? Yeah, the shredded cheese I had with my ramen. Have you slept for longer than usual today? I haven’t slept yet today. It’s 3:39AM, so I’ll be going to bed soon. Have you ever been to a drive-in theatre? A few times when I was a kid. I wish they still had those, it was fun. Have you ever smoked a cigarette? No. Have you consumed alcohol today? If so, what? No. What’s your go-to website when you’re really bored? Bored or not I always go on Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Who was the main cook of your Thanksgiving meal last year? My brother did the whole Thanksgiving feast, actually. Do you have a passport? If so, how many stamps do you have in it? Nope. Have you ever been dumped really harshly? Yes. Have you ever taken classes for a musical instrument? Yep, piano and violin. Have you ever been on vacation with someone other than your family? I went with a friend a few times. Do you live with your parents? Yes. Are there any embarrassing school pictures of you anywhere in your house? Not anywhere out in the open, thankfully. Can you do a blackflip, or anything else of that sort? Nope. What moment in your life have you been most scared? I’ve had a lot of moments like that. Do you have any exes you can’t stand anymore? What happened to cause you to feel that way about them? No. Do you ever make your own surveys, or just take them? I just take ‘em. What would your parents do if you told them you were pregnant right now? Uhhh they’d be very shocked and have a lot of questions. I’m sure they’d think I was kidding at first. Have you ever actually thought you were pregnant? Were you? No. Are you more of a phone or a computer person? Both. I’m a phone person in the sense that I’m on my phone a lot, not for phone calls or text messages, but for other things. Do you like to cook, or do you prefer when other people cook for you? I’m not a cook, so I like when others cook. Well, except for ramen. I like to make that myself. How old do you think you’ll be when you move out on your own? I don’t know. Do you have a job? If so, where do you work? If not, do you want one? I can’t work at this time. Have you ever ripped your pants in public? No. Do movies such as ‘Saw’ and ‘The Grudge’ scare you easily? When I was younger, but nah not anymore. Who do you talk to the most on MSN? I’ve never used MSN. How many best friends do you have? What are their names? My mom. What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever been dared to do? Did you do it? Nothing. Do you know anybody who has a birthday today? Nope. When is your birthday? How old will you be? July 28th. I’ll be 31. :/ Do you change the radio stations repeatedly in the car? I don’t listen to the radio anymore. Can you drive? Nope. Have you ever thought someone was talking to you, but it turned out they were on the phone? Did you play it off? Lol, yes. I’ve also waved back to someone who was actually waving to someone else. What do you consider to be a good grade? What do you consider to be a bad grade? Good to me was A’s and Bs. Bad was D’s and F’s. Have you ever had a teacher who hated you? No. Teachers loved me, I was a “pleasure to have in class.” Can you remember who your grade 5 teacher was? Did you like them? Yes. I remember crying when I first found out who my teacher was cause I had heard she was a mean lol. She wasn’t, though. I realized that a lot of the time, the people who said that about a teacher were actually the troublemakers. What’s your favourite TV show? I have several. In your opinion, who is the best looking celebrity out there at the moment? Alexander Skarsgard. Do you like peanut butter cookies? Yeah. Do you know anybody that has severe allergies? Yes. Do you have an iPod? How many songs are on it? It’s stored away, but yeah. I have no idea how many songs are on it. I haven’t used it since like 2012. Who was the last person you slow danced with? My crush danced with me at prom, ha. What was the last song you listened to on repeat? Say So by Doja Cat. What’s your favourite song at the moment? Say So by Doja Cat. It’s just so catchy. Do you prefer headphones or earbuds? Earbuds. Do you ever ride the city bus? How much does it cost you? Not anymore, but I had to sometimes back in college. How do you get to school? I’m done with school. Speaking of school, do you like it or hate it? I liked it overall, I guess. Looking back on it now after a few years I can say that, but during it I didn’t feel that way. Are you a social person? Nope. Are you reliable? I don’t feel very reliable...not now. I used to be. What person/people do you trust the most? My mom. Do you say ‘like’ a lot? Yeah, probably. What is the last book you read? Did you enjoy it? Because of Bethlehem by Max Lucado. Yes, I loved it. Do you buy CD’s anymore, or just download the songs? I just use Spotify. What is your favourite beverage to have in the morning? Coffee. Always. Do you scream out the answers while watching game shows on TV? I don’t “scream” them out, but yeah.

Who in your life do you care about more than yourself? My family. Would you ever consider adopting a child with a severe mental illness? I don’t plan on having or adopting kids at all. Do you have a brother or a sister? If so, are you close with them? If you are an only child, do you ever wish you had siblings? I have two brothers. I’m really close to my younger brother. When was the last time you were with all of your best friends? I see my mom everyday, we live together. We do a lot of stuff together. Do you ever go into photobooths? I did when I was a kid sometimes. Like the ones at the mall. Do you waste money on unnecessary things? I mean, I don’t need to keep buying clothes... I definitely have more than enough. Which wild animal would you most like to have as a pet? I don’t want a wild animal for a pet. They’re not meant to be pets. What bill do you hate paying the most? Uh, all of them. What's the best place to eat a romantic dinner? Hmm. When is the last time you got drunk and danced on a bar? Never. Name of your second grade teacher? Mrs. K. What do you really want to be doing right now? I should go to sleep. What did you want to be when you were growing up? I wanted to be a teacher when I was a kid. Gas prices...first thought? They’re high. If you could move anywhere and take someone with you, who and where would it be? I don’t know where, but I’d move with my family. We want to, actually. Last thought before falling asleep last night? I don't recall. My mind goes all over the place. Favorite style of underwear? Favorite style of underwear for the opposite sex? Hipster for me, boxers or boxer briefs for guys. What errands or chores do you despise? I don’t particularly like doing any of them. Your favorite cartoon character? Winnie the Pooh. Favorite non sexual thing to do with girl/boy? Talk. A secret that you wouldn't mind everyone knowing? It’s a secret. What was your first car? Never had one. Your best YO MAMA joke? What year is this. Beach or lake? I love the beach. Who do you stalk on Facebook? No one. Favorite guilty pleasure? I don’t consider anything I like doing to be a guilty pleasure. Favorite movie you wouldn't want anyone to find out about? There isn’t one I’m ashamed of. What's your drink? Coffee. The regular kind and Starbucks Doubleshot energy drink. Do you cheer for the bad guy? I do like a good villain in a movie. What Hollywood star do you think resembles you best? None. What do you want to do when you are sick? Sleep. Who from high school would you like to run in to? No one. What famous person would you like to have dinner with? Alexander Skarsgard. What famous person would you like to sleep with? I mean... ^^^ ha. Start a new career, or relationship? Neither at this time. Do you go to church? Not at this time, but I do listen to the sermons from a local church that are uploaded every Sunday.

#personal #text #survey #surveys

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consulting-celiac-in-the-tardis · 5 years ago

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47 Gluten Free Healthy Meal Prep Breakfasts for the New Year

New blog post! Are you a sweet or savory breakfast person? I'm constantly switching back in forth, but now that 2020 is in full swing and I'm back to my busy grad school and work schedule, I'm alll about healthy meal prep breakfasts...so I thought it would be a great time to share a ton of gluten free meal prep recipes on the blog! Whether you're looking for a healthy keto recipe, general meal prep ideas or healthy grab and go breakfasts to fit your own busy life, this round up has a recipe that will make eating a nutritious breakfast extra easy this year. Sweet and savory breakfast options galore!

And because I'm so excited to dig into these gluten free breakfast recipes, I'm keeping this intro short. So without further adieu, here are 47 gluten free healthy meal prep breakfasts to make your 2020 extra delicious.

1. Crustless Spinach Cheese Pie (Low Carb) - Low Carb Yum

This simple low carb recipe turns pie into breakfast food.

2. Paleo Blueberry Muffins (Vegan, Dairy Free, Refined Sugar Free) - A Sweet Alternative

These paleo muffins seriously give the traditional wheat-packed bakery muffins a run for their money.

3. Pepperoni Pizza Frittata (Whole30, Low Carb, Keto) - Cook at Home Mom

Healthy pizza for breakfast = mind (and taste buds) blown.

4. Overnight Quinoa Flakes (Vegan) - Casey the College Celiac

If you're craving a warm porridge but can't tolerate oats, this overnight quinoa flakes breakfast is the perfect alternative. Plus, I include multiple different flavors you can make!

5. Healthy Chocolate Peanut Butter Energy Balls (Vegan, Refined Sugar Free) - A Baking Journey

Is there any better combo than peanut butter and chocolate?!? I don't think so!

6. Green Dairy Free Egg Bites - Really Are You Serious

Upgrade the typical breakfast egg muffins with spinach and tofu!

7. Chocolate Protein Pancakes (Low Carb, Keto) - Wholesome Yum

First of all, droooool. Secondly, this big batch recipe means you'll have plenty of leftovers to eat later that week or freezer.

8. Skinny Mini Mexican Frittatas - Jersey Girl Cooks

Sweet peppers, hot sauce and Mexican cheese give these frittatas some extra kick.

9. Homemade and Healthy Nuts and Seeds Instant Breakfast Mix (Dairy Free Option) - Original Homesteading

Just add water to this nuts and seeds mix for a crunchy breakfast full of plant-based protein.

10. Keto Breakfast Casserole (Low Carb) - Sorey Fitness

This healthy keto breakfast can be whipped up in just 30 minutes, and is packed with ground cheese, sausage, eggs and jalapenos.

11. Easy Vegan Breakfast: Superfood Stone Fruit Rawnola - Stacey Homemaker

Whip up this vegan granola on Sunday so you have a yummy, nutrition-packed breakfast all week long.

12. Breakfast Meal Prep Blueberry Turkey Breakfast Sausage & Roasted Veggies (Dairy Free, Egg Free, Paleo) - Hungry Hobby

I've never eaten blueberries and turkey together before, but this breakfast bowl makes me want to try.

13. Spiced Apple Granola (Vegan) - Recipes From a Pantry

Make your kitchen smell like apple pie season all year round with this vegan granola recipe.

14. Breakfast Chia Seed Pudding, Two Ways (Vegan) - Lathi's Kitchen

Strawberry or mango puree makes these chia seed puddings super fruity and flavorful.

15. How to Bake Eggs in an Oven Tin in the Oven (Dairy Free, Soy Free) - Key to My Lime

Once you try baking eggs in the oven, you'll never go back.

16. Roasted Vegetable Sheet Pan Omelette (Vegetarian) - The Recipe Well

An omelet that you don't have to flip?!? Sold!

17. Super Clumpy Summer Squash Granola (Vegan, Oil Free, Sugar Free) - Casey the College Celiac

Pair this gluten free granola with your favorite yogurt or eat it like cereal with milk.

18. Tortitas de Berro, or Easy Guatemalan Watercress Fritters (Vegetarian) - A Taste for Travel

Popular in Guatemala and El Salvador, you can think of these as bite-sized omelettes packed with good-for-you ingredients.

19. One Bowl Blueberry Oat Flour Waffles - Flavor the Moments

Make your own freezer waffles at home with this easy one-bowl recipe. Just make sure you use gluten free oats to grind into flour.

20. Cinnamon Swirl Protein Muffins (Keto) - The Helpful GF

I was sold at "cinnamon swirl"...

21. Roasted Tomato, Kale and Goat Cheese Frittata (Vegetarian) - Hot Pan Kitchen

If you've been looking for an easy cast iron skillet recipe, this frittata breakfast is a winner.

22. Easy Chia Seed Pudding Recipe (Vegetarian, Vegan Options) - Two Healthy Kitchens

If you're looking for an extensive guide to meal prepping chia seed pudding, Shelley has you covered with this post.

23. Southwest Tofu Breakfast Bowls (Vegan) - The Fitchen

I'm not even a huge fan of tofu, but this meal prep breakfast still has me drooling!

24. Banana Snacking Cake - Best of This Life

Banana and applesauce combine to make an extra moist gluten free cake that's healthy enough to eat for breakfast or a snack!

25. Sweet Potato Smoothie Bowl (Paleo, Vegan, Nut-Free, Whole-30 Option) - Paleo Gluten-Free Guy

This gluten free and paleo smoothie bowl will keep in the fridge for up to five days, and you'll love how thick and creamy it is.

26. Coconut Chia Pudding (Vegan, Low Carb) - Pepper Bowl

No cooking necessary for this vegan breakfast. Just throw the ingredients together and let it sit for at least 30 minutes.

27. Maple Pecan Granola (Refined Sugar Free) - Zestful Kitchen

No gluten or refined sugar needed to meal prep this epic granola.

28. Chickpea Savory Muffins - Mind Body and Spirit Wellbeing

Who knew that chickpea flour could taste so good?

29. Crockpot Fiesta Breakfast Casserole (Paleo and Whole 30 Options) - Pink Fortitude

And if you really want to meal prep ahead of time, you can even freeze this paleo breakfast casserole for future breakfasting!

30. Cozy Cacao Oatless Zoats (Vegan) - Casey the College Celiac

If you want to make a gluten free porridge breakfast while also sneaking in some extra veggies, zoats need to land on your weekly menu ASAP.

31. Sweet Potato Breakfast Casserole - Leelalicious

No one will complain about eating this gluten free casserole several mornings in a row!

32. Skinny Strawberry Shortcake Bites Recipe (Vegan) - Bake Me Some Sugar

These shortcake bites are as tasty for a snack or dessert as they are for breakfast.

33. Instant Pot Egg Bites (Keto, Low Carb) - Tasty Galaxy

Using the instant pot makes this healthy keto breakfast insanely quick and easy.

34. Cinnamon Roll Overnight Oatmeal - Pinch of Wellness

Cinnamon roll in oatmeal form? You know that caught my taste buds' attention!

35. Blueberry French Toast Casserole (Dairy Free Option) - This Mama Cooks

Use your favorite gluten free bread, and you'll never want to eat plain toast for breakfast ever again!

36. Easy Egg Muffin Cups - Fearless Dining

There's no easier - or tastier - healthy grab and go breakfasts than these egg muffins!

37. Tropical Instant Pot Steel Cut Oats (Dairy-Free, Vegan) - Clean Eating Kitchen

Send your taste buds on a tropic vacation with this gluten free oatmeal recipe featuring papaya and coconut cream.

38. Banana Cinnamon Breakfast Muffins (Vegan, Paleo, Refined Sugar Free) - Emma Eats and Explores

Because banana and cinnamon are always a pair made for culinary heaven.

39. Creamy Spirulina Chia Seed Pudding (Vegan) - Casey the College Celiac

Put this chia seed pudding in the blender for a super thick and creamy vegan breakfast that's full of fiber and plant based protein.

40. Western Omelet Egg Scramble with Cheese Sauce - Sweet Peas Kitchen

Who knew you could freeze egg scrambles? The cheese sauce also takes this breakfast to the next level.

41. Dairy Free Waffles - Eating on A Dime

You only need six simple ingredients to make and freeze these dairy free waffles for super easy (and yummy) future breakfasts.

42. Healthy Blueberry Breakfast Bars (Vegan, Peanut Free, Nut Free) - Allergy Yummy

You won't believe you only need three ingredients to whip up these super gooey, chewy bars.

43. Cheesy Spinach Mini Frittatas Recipe - Urban Bliss Life

These easy egg muffins are the ultimate healthy grab and go breakfast option for busy mornings.

44. Vanilla Chia Pudding (Vegan) - Debra Klein

You only need fifteen minutes and four ingredients to make this creamy vegan breakfast.

45. Triple Berry "Whole Grain" Gluten Free Muffins (Vegan, Oil Free) - Casey the College Celiac

'Cause there's muffin better to start the day with! ;)

46. Instant Pot Egg Bites (Keto, Low Carb) - Tasty Galaxy

The instant pot makes cooking a healthy keto breakfast extra easy and quick.

47. Healthy Pumpkin Bread - Claudia Canu

This gluten free pumpkin bread proves that pumpkin is delicious year-round, especially when baked in a naturally sweetened treat like this one.

Happy 2020!

Regardless of where 2020 is taking you so far, I hope that these meal prep breakfasts will give you the tasty fuel you need to kick life's booty! And if you need even more gluten free breakfast inspiration, check out my previous roundup: 49 Healthy Gluten Free Breakfasts For the New Year. Which of these breakfast recipes do you want to try first? Are you a sweet or savory breakfast person? Tell me in the comments! via Blogger https://ift.tt/2T7MhKK

#Blogger #college #celiac #gluten free #coeliac #celiacs #paleo #primal #foodporn #foodart

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aching-tummies · 5 years ago

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Chocolate Indulgence

Ever had one of those moments where you're staring down a food-item you know is going to absolutely wreck your stomach...but you know you'll eat it anyway?

Most of the people I know that have a dairy-sensitivity (e.g. lactose, rectin, etc.) tend to have moments like that frequently. They know eating cheese is going to cause Satan-himself to reach in and clench their stomach in his vice-like grip, but one does not simply say 'no' to pizza. Then there's the ones that ensure they've got dibs on the closest washroom before they shovel ice-cream or a milkshake into their system and that particular washroom becomes a hazmat zone for the next three hours. I've seen the latter used with purpose too when this particular someone I knew was pretty backed-up while travelling. He was out with some friends when he realized it'd been quite a while since he had last went no.2. His friends knew about his dairy-sensitivity and their eyes widened when he ordered something with dairy from the shiftiest-looking vendor in the area (he was also a huge germaphobe, so the fact that he went even 3 ft near that vendor already caused jaws to drop). He chugged it, asked his friends to wait around the area for a solid hour or two, and then proceeded to violate the public washroom. He came back looking like the definition of ‘relief’ just as his friends had started to think he had died ‘cuz they didn’t expect him to be in the washroom that long.

While not as dramatic, I sort of had one of these moments last night. Of course, it wasn't just that one moment that led to that, it was a whole day of events that led up to the moment.

I started the day going out to have breakfast with a family member before heading off to work. A favorite fast-food chain had recently opened a location near our place and near the place I worked so we decided to go there for breakfast/lunch, whatever you want to call it. I've been eating less recently, being busy and anxious about work and some other life-stuff...also with my work being at non-consistent hours my family member ends up eating without me and most of the time I'm too exhausted to bother cooking for myself. I live with some fairly judgemental family members who go off on me if I don't clean up properly when they say so and cooking for myself just becomes more of a hassle than it's worth. E.g. I'll make some instant noodles for myself and before I've even taken the first bite they'll come over and start screeching about how I left a cooking utensil in the sink rather than clean it and leave it out to dry before I sat down to eat. I was already eating straight out of the pot I was cooking the thing in, the utensil was a butter-knife I used to get some XO sauce or whatever out of the jar and into the pot...and the butter knife wasn't necessary or useful for eating the noodles. My plan was to leave it in the sink and wash everything all at once in about 20 minutes when I had finished my food. I didn't want to deal with the screeching after hours of dealing with customers and co-workers screeching at me to do a task while I was in the middle of doing another task someone else had screeched at me to do, so I've opted to roll with being hungry for the last few days. My usual routine was wake up, get ready, make a quick breakfast to get me through my shift, come home and stay out of the way until dinner time with my family--if there was going to be a shared dinner-time, and then go to bed.

Yesterday was basically the same. I had breakfast at a fast-food restaurant with a family member who was kind enough to drop me off at work. After work I decided to come home rather than eat out after work (I wanted to save some money). I went home and was already pretty hungry but dinner wasn't going to be for another four or more hours. I ended up taking a nap, realizing after I woke up that I had managed to get through the day without drinking coffee, and that was probably why I ended up napping. I got downstairs to find that my family member had opted to cook for themselves, meaning I was on my own for dinner. I grabbed something small and self-contained to avoid being yelled at for making a mess and went about my business. Hours later, I was getting ready for bed. I couldn't sleep 'cuz my stomach had been growling at me since I started brushing my teeth. I was fairly awake from the nap I had taken so I decided, "screw it--I'll grab something to eat and watch a movie or something before I go to sleep".

What to eat, right? After days of being hungry after work, I decided I deserved a treat. I was really craving something sweet, but the only thing that satisfied that sweet tooth was some coffee I had in the fridge...which I was definitely not going to indulge in. I wanted to sleep eventually and coffee at 2AM was ridiculous. What else is sweet and goes almost hand-in-hand with coffee? Chocolate. Pancakes would make a mess, mug-cake was an option but I didn't want to measure out everything...also, one of my family members has been pretty snarky about finding flour on the counters. Some of it is from them, but since I'm the one that's always making home-made pasta and other types of noodles it's always my fault if there's a powdery substance on the counters. I didn't want to just outright eat chocolate chips like I usually do 'cuz I had already brushed my teeth and felt bad about eating something that would stick to my teeth and add to decay. In the end, I opted for a mug of hot chocolate. I was craving something sweet, specifically chocolate, and hot chocolate fit the bill. If I rinsed my mouth with some water after drinking it then it’d probably be okay.

My usual method is dumping the packet into a mug, filling it about 2/3 of the way with hot water, stirring until the powder is dissolved, and then topping up the final 1/3 with cold 2% milk. The milk makes it richer as well as cools down the contents enough to drink. I hesitated a little about adding the milk, the boba-incident fresh in my mind. I decided "screw it. I don't have to work tomorrow" and I added the milk to the mug. I decided to indulge further. It's been a crappy week walking on eggshells at home and at work and choosing to be hungry rather than listen to family members rant and yell over a bit of flour...so I found some nutella and added a generous spoonful to the hot chocolate. If you haven't tried this, you should (provided you don't have a nut allergy). I recommend dissolving the nutella in the hot-water/powder mix, prior to adding milk. The heat will allow it to melt that much faster. That mug of hot chocolate was heavenly.

I took the mug upstairs and put on something to watch while I enjoyed my chocolate-y treat. A couple of hours later, I was ready for bed.

As I lay down, waiting to sleep, I felt an odd sensation in my stomach. It wasn't painful. It was just shy of uncomfortable. It was an odd feeling I couldn't place. Was I still hungry? Were my guts unhappy with the little bit of dairy in the hot chocolate? It felt like a mild pressure around my navel-area, but my stomach was definitely empty too. I rubbed my stomach a little, staying awake for a while monitoring the feeling, hoping that it wouldn't be a repeat of the boba incident. I didn't have to work the next day, but I didn't want to go about the whole day feeling like a painfully bloated basketball. I don't know if it was gas from the dairy 'cuz I couldn't burp and I didn't feel any gurgles or gas-bubbles moving around under my palms. It wasn’t entirely like hunger either. It felt like there was something sitting in my guts...not painfully, but just present, and my stomach was undecided about whether this something meant it was allowed to be hungry or not. I guess my stomach was confused. It was so late that it was early, usually an hour where everything is asleep, there was dairy somewhere slightly bloating up my guts, but it was also hungry. I had downed dairy on an empty stomach and it was confused...was it supposed to still be hungry? Was it supposed to go to sleep? Was the dairy going to be a problem? To growl or not to growl?

Definitely not as dramatic as something my dairy-sensitive friends have gone through, but that's what I thought about while I was soothing my stomach before going to sleep. I added the milk to my hot chocolate, wary that it would upset my stomach. Whatever that feeling was, at least it allowed me to sleep. I was still hungry, seeing as the only solid food I had to eat was over 14 hours ago and it was the 'empty calories' of fast food, but at least I didn't have to contend with the gnawing hunger as I tried to sleep. I didn’t add a whole lot of milk into the hot chocolate, so it wasn’t enough to cause some major indigestion. Not sure if this happens to other people too, but I've found that when I sleep on a hungry stomach I wake up with a corner of my pillow in my mouth and a loud and cramping stomach demanding I fill it before it plays the 'nausea' card. I didn't want to spend my day off feeling hungry, nauseous, and contending with indigestion.

As always, feel free to send asks in talking about tummy stuff. If it hits my kinks or I like it, I'll post the reply. If you don't see it odds are either that tumblr ate it or I'm not really interested in it and I can't contact you to say that if you're on-anon. Sometimes I’ll let the ask sit in my inbox for a while until I figure out how I’ll respond to it. I tend to be hungry fairly often lately, so if you ever wanna just send a stab in the dark hunger-RP-esque ask that’s totally fine. I’m not too big on the idea of teasing with food or overly patronizing banter, but tummy-centric stuff like manual stimulation of my hungry tummy for the growls/sensations or some way to torture my aching guts is usually something I’m down for. Hands on a suffering stomach are a pretty steady craving whenever I fall into kink-feels. Navel-stuff is rare to see, but definitely welcome too.

#tummy kink #hunger kink

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stattic-writes · 5 years ago

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Flu Pt 2

https://statticscribbles.tumblr.com/post/639099629845233664/masterlist

Support My Writing?

#sweet pea #archie andrews #toni topaz #jughead jones #sweet pea x archie #swarchie #archie x sweet pea #sweet pea x archie andrews #archie andrews x sweet pea #riverdale #riverdale cw #riverdale imagine #riverdale fandom #riverdale request #written

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drlaurynlax · 6 years ago

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Things You Need To Know About The Dangers of Calcium Supplementation

Calcium is an essential part of bones and teeth. It is also important for the heart, nerves, and blood-clotting systems.

Pop question: What mineral do you need to “build strong bones?”

Your doctor’s answer: Calcium!

Where do you get it?

Your doctor’s answer: Milk, cheese, yogurt and supplements.

Calcium is one of the top prescribed supplements by doctors—particularly for women to prevent osteoporosis.

And, since the early 90’s, and the big “Got Milk?” (1993) and “3-a-Day” Dairy (2003) campaigns, we’ve been told to up our dairy consumption because we’re “deficient in calcium.”

But…you haven’t heard the whole truth. Calcium supplementation and dairy consumption are NOT the ideal ways to build strong bones.

Here’s why:

CALCIUM SUPPLEMENTATION DANGERS

You’ve seen them on commercials, grocery store shelves or ads in magazines: Multi-vitamins WITH calcium, cereal and yogurt enhanced WITH calcium, caramel calcium chews to prevent osteoporosis—calcium supplements are prescribed about as often as Vitamin C for a cold, particularly for women.

However, not so fast—research shows that calcium supplementation has a dark side:

1.) Supplemental calcium increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and heart-attacks, and;

2.) Calcium supplementation doesn’t reduce fracture rates (it actually may increase them).

Calcium supplements “calcify” (harden) our bones and other tissues—like our arteries. You want soft and pliable arteries, not hard arteries; thus, when we have excess supplemental calcium circulating in our body, it “calcifies” our cardiovascular system.

One study (Kuanrong et al, 2012) of 24,000 men and women ages 34 to 65, found that those who supplemented with calcium had a 139 percent higher risk of heart attack versus those whose calcium intake came from food who had no change in risk. A meta-analysis of 15 different studies, which confirmed the same thing: higher risk of heart attack in those who took a calcium supplement. (Boland et al, 2010), and most recently, an analysis analysis of 100 000 65-year-old women taking 1000 mg calcium every day,found that as many as 5917 heart attacks and 4373 strokes could be caused (Revdal, 2016).

As for the fracture case, due to the highly unabsorbed amount of calcium from supplements and foods,your bones are simply not getting what they need from calcium pills or cleverly marketed foods alone.

One study (Bolland, 2015) said that additional calcium increased bone mineral density by only 1 to 2 percent, which was “unlikely to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in risk of fracture.” A second study analyzed by Bolland, contained 59 controlled trials, the majority of which focused on calcium supplements. Again, researchers using this data concluded that the extra calcium did not lower the risk of bone fractures. Other re-views of the literature have found that it may enhance bone density but does not provide protection from fracture. Other reviews of the literature have demonstrated that it improves bone density but does not provide protection from fracture.

THE REAL MISSING NUTRIENTS

Vitamin D and Vitamin K2 are essential for calcium absorption. You can be taking or eating all of it in the world, but if you are low in either of these Vitamins, you will run into calcium deficiency or malabsorption every time. Vitamin D—aka the “sunshine” vitamin—is ideally derived from 30-60 minutes of sunlight exposure (even by a window) most days, and can also be found in a supplement (Recommended: between 1,000 and 4,000 IU per day, depending on your deficiency status).

Vitamin K2 is also most readily found in supplement form, with a baseline of about 30 to 45 mg as a “nutritional therapy dose”—and it’s safe to take with no adverse side effects noted in literature.

Protein deficiency can also inhibit calcium absorption, as can a lack in other calcium co-factors—minerals that promote the homeostasis of this mineral in the body—including magnesium, Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, and hydrochloric acid (stomach acid).

UNDIGESTED DAIRY

Speaking of stomach acid—without it, digestion suffers. Most people (about 3 in 4) have some sort of GI dysfunction or symptom (gas, bloating, skin breakouts, allergies, GERD, etc.). The problem with most conventional dairy is that it is highly processed, and contains high amounts additives and/or sugars (yogurt, ice cream, fat free dairy) and lactose—most human guts do not contain the appropriate amount of the enzyme lactase to digest lactose in the first place.

So even though you may be eating dairy, you are probably not absorbing it.

(The better option? The REAL thing. Full-fat, grass-fed dairy is naturally LOW in difficult-to-digest lactose and is NOT processed like your fat-free, low-fat and fake cheese products. Find a natural grocer or farmer for organic, grass-fed, full-fat milk, cheese and yogurt if dairy is your thing, OR find your substitutes for dairy-free products like:

• Coconut Yogurt • Coconut, Almond or Cashew Milk (carageenan free) • Nutritional Yeast (cheese)

FALSE ADVERTISING

You’ve heard and seen the campaigns before.

Unfortunately, the “Got Milk?” and “3-a-day” campaigns were spurred on, not to help you improve your health, but instead sell more milk cartons, cheese and yogurt (while maybe under the false pretense that you were improving your health). Since then we’ve learned all the above re-search, and realize, “You can’t believe everything you always hear.”

Instead of falling for the food industry’s keen marketing skills, why not get it in from the real deal—absorbable forms of calcium for your baseline of 600-800 mg/day (given you are getting in an appropriate amount of protein, Vitamin D3-supplements and sunshine and Vitamin K2–supplements).

Here are some of the best foods to reach for (the real deal) instead of the false claims:

Sesame Seeds—1/2 cup – 351 mg

Sardines—1 can, 351 mg

Collard Greens—1 cup, 268 mg

Kale-1 cup, 190 mg

Yogurt—1 cup, 452 mg

Spinach- 1 cup, 245 mg

Bok Choy, 1 cup- 80 mg

Turnip Greens, 1 cup-100 mg

Seaweed, 1 cup-126 mg

Canned Wild Salmon (with bones is a bonus)—3 oz., 188 mg

Salmon, Sockeye, 3 oz.-450 mg

Tuna fish, canned in water, 3 oz.- 154 mg

Beet Greens- 1 cup, 165 mg

Milk— 1/2 cup, 138 mg

Cabbage—1 cup, 63 mg

Broccoli—1 cup, 62 mg

Brussels Sprouts—1 cup, 56 mg

Orange- 1, 65 mg

Asparagus—1 cup, 41 mg

Grass-fed Full Fat Raw Cheese- 228 mg

Unsweetened almond milk-451 mg

Beans & Lentils, 1/2 cup- 90-120 mg

Chia Seeds, 1 tbsp.- 126 mg

Grass-fed Whey Protein, 1 scoop-200 mg

Figs, 8-107 mg

Almonds, 1 oz.-72 mg

Fermented Tofu, 1/2 cup-860 mg

Blackstrap Molasses, 1 tbsp.-172 mg

Bonus Thrive Tip:

Make sure you’re digesting your supplements and foods you eat in the first place with a quality probiotic, HCL or Apple Cider vinegar with meals and digestive enzymes (as needed) to help you get the biggest bang from your nutrition buck.

The bottom line?

Ditch the Calcium Supplements in favor of real (whole) foods, digestive wellness and calcium co-factors (like Vitamin D, K2, Vitamin A in cod liver oil and Magnesium).

The post Things You Need To Know About The Dangers of Calcium Supplementation appeared first on Meet Dr. Lauryn.

Source/Repost=> https://drlauryn.com/wellness-knowledge/calcium-supplementation-dangers/ ** Dr. Lauryn Lax __Nutrition. Therapy. Functional Medicine ** https://drlauryn.com/

#Holistic #Nutrition #Therapy #Recovery #Functional #Medicine #Dr. Lauryn Lax #Dr.Lauryn

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muhyousafsalfi · 6 years ago

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Why are so many people getting a meat allergy?

Becoming allergic to meat turns your life upside down. Known as alpha-gal allergy, the condition dictates what you can eat, wear, how you relax, and even which medicines are safe. Is research finally starting to catch up?

It is early morning in early summer, and I am tracing my way through the woods of central North Carolina, steering cautiously around S-curves and braking hard when what looks like a small rise turns into a narrow bridge. I am on my way to meet Tami McGraw, who lives with her husband and the youngest of their kids in a sprawling development of old trees and wide lawns just south of Chapel Hill. Before I reach her, McGraw emails. She wants to feed me when I get there:

“Would you like to try emu?” she asks. “Or perhaps some duck?”

These are not normal breakfast offerings. But for years, nothing about McGraw’s life has been normal. She cannot eat beef or pork, or drink milk or eat cheese or snack on a gelatine-containing dessert without feeling her throat close and her blood pressure drop. Wearing a wool sweater raises hives on her skin; inhaling the fumes of bacon sizzling on a stove will knock her to the ground. Everywhere she goes, she carries an array of tablets that can beat back an allergy attack, and an auto-injecting EpiPen that can jolt her system out of anaphylactic shock.

McGraw is allergic to the meat of mammals and everything else that comes from them: dairy products, wool and fibre, gelatine from their hooves, char from their bones. This syndrome affects some thousands of people in the USA and an uncertain but likely larger number worldwide, and after a decade of research, scientists have begun to understand what causes it. It is created by the bite of a tick, picked up on a hike or brushed against in a garden, or hitchhiking on the fur of a pet that was roaming outside.

The illness, which generally goes by the name ‘alpha-gal allergy’ after the component of meat that triggers it, is a trial that McGraw and her family are still learning to cope with. In much the same way, medicine is grappling with it too. Allergies occur when our immune systems perceive something that ought to be familiar as foreign. For scientists, alpha-gal is forcing a remapping of basic tenets of immunology: how allergies occur, how they are triggered, whom they put in danger and when.

For those affected, alpha-gal is transforming the landscapes they live in, turning the reliable comforts of home – the plants in their gardens, the food on their plates — into an uncertain terrain of risk.

In 1987, Dr Sheryl van Nunen was confronted with a puzzle. She was the head of the allergy department at a regional hospital in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and had a reputation among her colleagues for sorting out mysterious episodes of anaphylaxis. This time, a man had been sent to see her who kept waking up, in the middle of the night, in the grip of some profound reaction.

Van Nunen knew at once that this was out of the ordinary, since most allergic reactions happen quickly after exposure instead of hours later. She also knew that only a few allergens affect people after they have gone to bed. (Latex, for instance — someone sensitive to it who has sex using a latex condom might fall asleep and wake up in the midst of an allergy attack.) She checked the man for the obvious irritants and, when those tests came up negative, took a thorough look at his medical history and did a skin test for everything he had eaten and touched in the hours before bedtime. The only potential allergen that returned a positive result was meat.

This was weird (and dismaying, in barbecue-loving Australia). But it was the only such case Van Nunen had ever seen. She coached the patient on how to avoid the meals that seemed to be triggering his reactions, put it down mentally to the unpredictability of the human immune system, and moved on.

Then a few more such patients came her way. There were six additional ones across the 1990s; by 2003, she had seen at least 70, all with the same problem, all apparently affected by meat they had eaten a few hours before. Groping for an explanation, she lengthened the list of questions she asked, quizzing the patients about whether they or their families had ever reacted to anything else: detergents, fabrics, plants in their gardens, insects on the plants.

“And invariably, these people would say to me: ‘I haven’t been bitten by a bee or a wasp, but I’ve had lots of tick bites,” Van Nunen recalls.

In her memory, Tami McGraw’s symptoms began after 2010. That was the year she and her husband Tom, a retired surgeon, spied a housing bargain in North Carolina, a development next to a nature reserve whose builder had priced the big houses to sell. The leafy spread of streams and woodland pockets was everything she wanted in a home. She didn’t realise that it offered everything that deer and birds and rodents, the main hosts of ticks, want as well.

She remembers one tick that attached to her scalp, raising such a welt the spot was red for months afterwards, and a swarm of baby ticks that climbed her legs and had to be scrubbed off in a hot bath laced with bleach. Unpredictably, at odd intervals, she began to get dizzy and sick.

“I’d have unexplained allergic reactions, and I’d break out in hives and my blood pressure would go crazy,” she told me. The necklines of all her T-shirts were stretched, because she tugged at them to relieve the feeling she couldn’t take a deep breath. She trekked to an array of doctors who diagnosed her with asthma or early menopause or a tumour on her pituitary gland. They prescribed antibiotics and inhalers and steroids. They sent her for MRI scans, pulmonary function tests, echocardiograms of her heart. Nothing yielded a result.

Looking back, she realises she missed clues as to the source of her problem. She always seemed to need to use an asthma inhaler on Wednesdays — the day she spent hours in her car, delivering steaming-hot dinners for Meals on Wheels. She would feel short of breath, and need to visit an urgent-care clinic, on Saturdays — which always started, in her household, with a big breakfast of eggs and sausages.

Then a close friend had a scary episode, going for a run, arriving home and passing out on the hot concrete of her driveway. Once she was recovered, McGraw quizzed her. Her friend said: “They thought I got stung by a bee while I was running. But now they think maybe I have a red-meat allergy.”

McGraw remembers her first reaction was: That’s crazy. Her second was: Maybe I have that too.

She Googled, and then she asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat. The test result was so strongly positive, her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.

That should have been the end of her problems. Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life. One time, she took capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.

When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister. She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen. She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.

She struggled with the attacks’ unpredictability, and even more with the impact on her family. “I think I’m getting better, and then I realise I’m not,” she says. “I’m more knowledgeable about what I can and can’t do.”

The discovery of new diseases often follows a pattern. Scattered patients realise they are experiencing strange symptoms. They find each other, face to face in a neighbourhood or across the world on the internet. They bring their experience to medicine, and medicine is sceptical. And then, after some period of pain and recalcitrance, medicine admits that, in fact, the patients were right.

That is the story of the discovery of CFS/ME and Lyme disease, among others. But it is not the story of alpha-gal allergy. An odd set of coincidences brought the bizarre illness to the attention of researchers almost as soon as it occurred.

The story begins with a cancer drug called cetuximab, which came onto the market in 2004. Cetuximab is a protein grown in cells taken from mice. For any new drug, there are likely to be a few people that react badly to it, and that was true for cetuximab. In its earliest trials, one or two of every 100 cancer patients who got it infused into their veins had a hypersensitivity reaction: their blood pressure dropped and they had difficulty breathing.

That 1–2 per cent stayed consistent as cetuximab was given to larger and larger groups. And then there was an aberration. In clinics in North Carolina and Tennessee, 25 of 88 recipients were hypersensitive to the drug, with some so sick they needed emergency shots of epinephrine and hospitalisation. At about the same time, a patient who was receiving a first dose of cetuximab in a cancer clinic in Bentonville, Arkansas, collapsed and died.

The manufacturers, ImClone and Bristol-Myers Squibb, checked every obvious thing about the trial: the drug’s ingredients, the cleanliness of the manufacturing plants, even the practices at the medical centres where cetuximab had been administered. Nothing stood out. The most that researchers could guess at the time was that the unlucky recipients might have some kind of mouse allergy.

Then the first coincidence occurred: a nurse whose husband worked at the Bentonville clinic mentioned the death to Dr Tina Hatley, an immunologist in private practice in Bentonville. Hatley had recently finished postgraduate training at the University of Virginia’s allergy centre, and she mentioned the death to her former supervisor, Dr Thomas Platts-Mills.

The bad responses to the drug looked like allergic reactions, and they were common enough — and far enough from the manufacturer’s expectations — to be an intriguing research opportunity.

Platts-Mills pulled together a team, looping in Hatley and several current research fellows as well. Fairly quickly, they discovered the source of the problem. People were reacting to the drug because they had a pre-existing sensitivity, indicated by a high level of antibodies (called immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short) to a sugar that is present in the muscles of most mammals, though not in humans or other primates. The name of the sugar was galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, known for short as alpha-gal.

Alpha-gal is familiar to many scientists because it is responsible for an enduring disappointment: its ability to trigger intense immune reactions is the reason that organs taken from animals have never successfully been transplanted into people. The puzzle was why the drug recipients were reacting to it. To have an allergic reaction, someone needs to have been primed with a prior exposure to a substance — but the trial recipients who reacted badly were all on their first dose of cetuximab.

Team members scrutinised the patients and their families for anything that could explain the problem. The reactions appeared regional — patients in Arkansas and North Carolina and Tennessee experienced the hypersensitivity, but ones in Boston and northern California did not. They investigated parasites, moulds and diseases that occur only in pockets of the USA.

Then Dr Christine Chung, a Nashville researcher recruited to the team, stumbled on an intriguing clue. Almost one in five of the patients enrolled at a cancer clinic at her hospital had high levels of IgE to alpha-gal. But when she checked those patients’ near neighbours, treating them as a control group — that is, people who lived their lives in the same way, but did not have cancer and had no reason to have received the drug — almost one in five had antibodies to alpha-gal as well.

Almost a decade later, that correlation still makes Platts-Mills chuckle. The alpha-gal reaction “had nothing to do with cancer,” he says. “It had everything to do with rural Tennessee.”

The question then became: what in rural Tennessee could trigger a reaction like this? The answer arose from a second coincidence. Dr Jacob Hosen, a researcher in Platts-Mills’s lab, stumbled across a map drawn by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing the prevalence of an infection called Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It exactly overlapped the hot spots where the cetuximab reactions had occurred.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever is transmitted by the bite of a tick: Amblyomma americanum, one of the most common ticks in south-eastern USA. It’s known as the lone star tick for a blotch of white on the back of the female’s body.

The researchers wondered — if the mystery reactions shared a footprint with a disease, and ticks caused the disease, could ticks be linked to the reactions too?

It was an intriguing hypothesis, and was reinforced by a new set of patients who came trickling into Platts-Mills’s clinic at about the same time. They were all adults, and that was odd to start with, because allergies tend to show up in childhood. They had never had an allergic reaction before, but now they were experiencing allergy symptoms: swelling, hives and in the worst cases anaphylactic shock. They too had high levels of IgE antibodies to alpha-gal.

None of them, though, were cancer patients. They told the physicians that they had no proof of what was causing their reactions — but more than a few of them sensed it had something to do with eating meat.

Dr Scott Commins, another postgraduate fellow in Platts-Mills’s group, took it upon himself to phone every new patient to ask whether they’d ever suffered a tick bite. “I think 94.6 per cent of them answered affirmatively,” he says. “And the other few per cent would say, ‘You know, I’m outdoors all the time. I can’t remember an actual tick that was attached, but I know I’d get bites.’”

Meat from mammals inevitably contains alpha-gal — so in already sensitised individuals, eating meat might constitute a second exposure, in the same way infusing cetuximab had been.

If tick bites had sensitised them, then the alpha-gal reaction might be a food allergy as well as a drug reaction. But the connection was speculative, and cementing cause and effect would take one final, extraordinary coincidence.

As it happens, Platts-Mills likes to hike. One weekend he took off across the central Virginia hills, tramping through grassy underbrush. He came home five hours later, peeled off his boots and socks, and discovered his legs and feet were speckled with tiny dots. They looked like ground pepper, but they were dug into his skin — he had to use a dull knife to scrape them off — and they itched something fierce. He saved a few, and sent them to an entomologist. They were the larval form of lone star ticks.

This, he realised, was an opportunity. As soon as the work week started, he had his lab team draw his blood and check his IgE levels. They were low to start with, and then week by week began to climb. Platts-Mills is English — his father was a Member of Parliament — and in the midst of having his IgE tracked, he went to an event at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. “And at that point,” he says cheerfully, “I ate two lamb chops and drank two glasses of wine.”

In the middle of the night, he woke up covered in hives.

The lone star tick doesn’t receive much attention in the USA. It’s the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, that has the dubious honour of being the most well-known, as it’s the carrier of Lyme disease, which causes an estimated 300,000 cases of illness in the USA each year.

The lone star tick doesn’t transmit Lyme disease, but is the vector for other serious illnesses, including Q fever, ehrlichiosis, Heartland virus, Bourbon virus and tularaemia, an infection so serious that the US government classifies the bacteria that cause it as a potential agent of bioterrorism.

While Lyme clusters in the north-east and the northern Midwest, the diseases carried by Amblyomma stretch from the coast of Maine to the tip of Florida, the Atlantic to the middle of Texas, and the southern shores of the Great Lakes all the way to the Mexican border.

And that range appears to be expanding. “The northern edge of where these ticks are abundant is moving,” says Dr Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, north of New York City. “It is now well-established further north, into Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and well up into New England.

“Climate change is likely playing a role in the northward expansion,” Ostfeld adds, but acknowledges that we don’t know what else could also be contributing.

It’s a universal complaint among tick scientists that we don’t know as much about ticks as we should. Tick-transmitted illnesses are more common in the USA than mosquito-borne ones — according to the CDC’s most recent accounting, in 2017 tickborne diseases were 2.6 times more common than when the agency began counting in 2004 — yet it’s mosquitoes that receive the most public health attention and funding, from national surveillance programmes to local mosquito-control campaigns. (In fact, the CDC was founded in 1942 because of mosquito-borne disease; its original title was the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas.)

What is known about where ticks live, what they feed on, and how they are affected by changes in land use and climate has mostly been assembled out of the findings of scientists fighting for scarce research funding.

It’s impossible to talk to physicians encountering alpha-gal cases without hearing that something has changed to make the tick that transmits it more common — even though they don’t know what that something might be.

The lone star tick is a sturdy, stealthy predator. It isn’t picky about conditions — it tolerates the damp of Atlantic beaches, and its western expansion only stopped when it ran up against the Texas desert — and it’s content to feed from dozens of animals, from mice all the way up the tree of life.

It loves birds, which might have helped it move north so rapidly, and it has a special lust for the white-tailed deer that have colonised American suburbs. And, unlike most ticks, it bites humans in all three stages of its lifecycle: as an adult, as a nymph and as the poppy seed-sized larvae that attacked Platt-Mills, which linger on grass stalks in clusters and spring off hundreds at a time.

Ticks detect scent with organs embedded in their first pair of legs, and what they’re sniffing for is carbon dioxide, the exhaled breath of an animal full of warm oxygenated blood. When lone star ticks catch wind of it, they take off. “The Lyme disease tick is a slow tick,” says Dr William Nicholson, a microbiologist at the CDC. “Amblyomma will run to you.”

There has been so little research into alpha-gal allergy that scientists can’t agree on exactly what stage of the bite starts victims’ sensitisation. It is possible that a fragment of a previous blood meal, from a mouse, bird or deer, lingers in a tick’s guts and works its way up through its mouth and into its human victim. It’s also possible that some still-unidentified compound in tick saliva is chemically close enough to alpha-gal to produce the same effect.

One aspect of its epidemiology is becoming clear, though. The allergy isn’t only caused by the lone star tick.

In Australia, Van Nunen (who is now a clinical associate professor at the University of Sydney School of Medicine) couldn’t understand how her patients’ tick bites solved the mystery of their meat allergy. But she could see something else. The beaches that fringe the coast north and south of Sydney are rife with ticks. If bites from them were putting people at risk of a profound allergy, she felt compelled to get the word out.

In 2007, Van Nunen wrote up a description of 25 meat-allergic patients whose reactions she had confirmed with a skin-prick test. All but two had had severe skin reactions to a tick bite; more than half had suffered severe anaphylaxis. That abstract formed the basis of a talk she gave later that year to an Australian medical association, which was then indexed — but not published in full — in an Australian medical journal. It took until 2009 for the Virginia group to catch up to it, after they had already published their first alert.

That was unfortunate, because the crucial detail in Van Nunen’s research wasn’t just that her cases were earlier than the first round of American ones. It was that they were caused by bites from a different tick: Ixodes holocyclus, called the paralysis tick. Alpha-gal allergy was not just an odd occurrence in one part of the USA. It had occurred in the opposite hemisphere, making it literally a global problem.

And so it has proved. Alpha-gal reactions linked to tick bites have now been found in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Panama, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa. These cases trace back to at least six additional tick species. (An online map on which patients list themselves includes over a dozen more countries.)

Wherever ticks bite people — everywhere other than the Arctic and Antarctic — alpha-gal allergy has been recorded. In Belgium, patients reacted badly to a drug produced in rabbit cells. In the Italian Alps, men who went hunting in the forests were more at risk than women who stayed in their village. In Germany, the most reactive food was a traditional delicacy, pork kidneys. In Sweden, it was moose.

Van Nunen herself has now seen more than 1,200 patients. “The next busiest clinic, about 350,” she says. Those cases have all occurred in two decades, less than the span of a single human generation. As in America, the surge leaves Van Nunen mystified as to what the cause might be. She reasons that the rise cannot be due to something in her patients; neither genetic nor epigenetic change could occur so quickly.

“It has to be environmental,” she says.

It’s a sunny early morning at the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill. Commins, who moved here in 2016 to become an associate professor, has 11 patients to see before the end of the day. Seven of them have alpha-gal allergy.

Laura Stirling, 51, is fretting over a list of questions. She does not live nearby; she flew down from Maryland, drawn by Commins’s reputation. In 2016, she found a fat lone star tick attached to her, and afterwards had fierce indigestion whenever she ate or smelled pork — a challenge, because her husband likes to tinker with a smoker on weekends. In 2017, she was bitten again, and her symptoms worsened to midnight hives and lightheadedness that sent her to her doctor’s office. She immediately cut all meat and dairy from her diet. A year later, she wants to know if she can add anything back.

“Can I eat dairy?” she asks. “Can I cook dairy? Can I eat it if it doesn’t have animal rennet in it?” She pauses. “I’ve been symptom-free, because I don’t take risks.”

Commins walks her through a protocol he’s developed, a method for adding back mammal products one dose at a time. He has a hypothesis that alpha-gal reactions are linked to the fat content of food; that might explain why they take so many hours to occur, because the body processes fat via a slower metabolic pathway than protein or carbs.

He recommends that patients start with a spoonful of grated dry cheese, because its fat content is low, and graduate by slow steps up to full-fat yogurt and milk and then to ice cream. If those foods don’t provoke reactions, he suggests tiny doses of lean meat, starting with deli ham.

Stirling lights up at that. “I dream of charcuterie,” she sighs.

Because Commins was part of Platt-Mills’s earliest research, he has been seeing alpha-gal patients for more than a decade now. He estimates he has treated more than 900 men and women; five new patients arrive every week. He has coached a significant number of them back to eating some mammal products and managing their exposures to the things they can’t handle, so their worst experience is hunting for an emergency Benadryl, not being rushed to the ER.

Not every patient can do this. Julie LeSueur, who is 45 and lives in Richmond, Virginia, has been monitored by Platts-Mills for four years. (He is one of several doctors she has seen for the condition, after years of severe stomach issues escalated to repeated attacks of anaphylaxis that put her in hospital. One physician, frustrated she wasn’t getting better, told her: “This is all in your head.”)

What started as an allergy to meat expanded into reactions to anything with an animal connection, including gelatine in medications and animal products in cosmetics, and then to sensitising her immune system to an array of other irritants, from nuts to mould. She buys vegan soap and shampoo, has prescriptions formulated by a compounding pharmacy, and mostly works from home to avoid unintended exposures. Reluctantly, she cut back a hobby that meant the world to her: fostering animals that have been rescued from abuse.

“I’m at home all the time now,” she tells me by phone. “I’m lucky to get off the couch.”

Commins and Platts-Mills named alpha-gal allergy a decade ago, and Van Nunen saw her first patient 20 years before that. A lab test for the allergy, the one that Tami McGraw received, has been on the market since 2010. (Platts-Mills and Tina Hatley, now Merritt, share the patent.) That makes it hard to understand why patients still struggle to be diagnosed and understand the limits of what they can eat or allow themselves to be exposed to. But alpha-gal allergy defies some of the bedrock tenets of immunology.

Food allergies are overwhelmingly caused by proteins, tend to surface in childhood and usually trigger symptoms quickly after a food is consumed. Alpha-gal is a sugar; alpha-gal patients tolerate meat for years before their reactions begin; and alpha-gal reactions take hours to occur. Plus, the range of reactions is far beyond what’s normal: not only skin reactions in mild cases and anaphylaxis in the most serious, but piercing stomach pain, abdominal cramps and diarrhoea as well.

But alpha-gal reactions are definitely an allergy, given patients’ results on the same skin and IgE tests that immunologists use to determine allergies to other foods. That leads both Van Nunen and Commins to wonder whether the syndrome will help to reshape allergy science, broadening the understanding of what constitutes an allergy response and leading to new concepts of how allergies are triggered.

Merritt, who estimates she has seen more than 500 patients with alpha-gal allergy, has it herself; she has had bad reactions to meat all her life, since being bitten by seed ticks at Girl Scout camp, and was re-sensitised by a lone star tick bite last year. She is sensitive enough to react not only to meat, but to other products derived from mammal tissues — and as she has discovered, they are threaded throughout modern life.

The unrecognised dangers aren’t only sweaters and soaps and face creams. Medical products with an animal origin include the clotting drug heparin, derived from pork intestines and cow lung; pancreatic enzymes and thyroid supplements; medicines that include magnesium stearate as an inert filler; vaccines grown in certain cell lines; and other vaccines, and intravenous fluids, that contain gelatine.

“We have enormous difficulty advising people about this,” Van Nunen says. “Sometimes you have to sit down for seven hours, write seven emails and have four telephone conversations to be able to say to a 23-year-old woman who’s about to travel: ‘Yes, you may have this brand of Japanese encephalitis vaccine because they do not use bovine material. The vaccine is made in [cells from] the African green monkey and I have looked up that monkey and it does not contain alpha-gal.’”

Some replacement heart values are grown in pigs; they may cause alpha-gal sensitisation that could trigger an allergy attack later. And cardiac patients who have alpha-gal allergy seem to use up replacement heart valves more quickly than normal, putting them at risk of heart failure until they can get a replacement.

There’s also a growing sense that alpha-gal may be an occupational hazard. Last year, researchers in Spain treated three farm workers who developed hives and swelling and had difficulty breathing after being splashed with amniotic fluid while they were helping calves to be born. All three of them — a 36-year-old woman, a 56-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man — already knew they had alpha-gal sensitivity, but had never imagined that skin contact would be risky.

Commins has treated hunters who developed reactions after being splashed with blood after field dressing deer; those cases raise the possibility that meat-processing workers could be at risk. In the two main Facebook groups where patients gather, it’s common to hear school cafeteria workers fret about reactions from breathing the fumes of meat cooking.

Last summer, researchers working with Commins reported that people with alpha-gal allergy may have greater allergic reactions to the stings of bees and wasps, potentially endangering landscapers and other outdoor workers.

It’s hard to know how many people may be sensitised to alpha-gal without knowing it. A project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that studies unexplained occurrences of anaphylaxis found last year that 9 per cent of the cases weren’t unexplained after all: they were alpha-gal patients whose sensitivity had never been diagnosed.

Platts-Mills points out that the prevalence of high levels of alpha-gal IgE in his earliest studies was up to 20 per cent in some communities, “but that was absolutely not the prevalence of allergic reactions to meat,” he says. “So there are clearly plenty of people out there who’ve got the antibody but don’t have this syndrome.”

What this all means is that there are almost certainly people for whom a meat-containing meal or medical intervention could trigger an alpha-gal reaction of unknown severity.

There may be further peril awaiting them. In June, Platts-Mills and other researchers revealed that more than a quarter of patients who came to the University of Virginia’s medical centre for cardiac catheterisation, to clear out life-threatening blood-vessel blockages, were sensitised to alpha-gal without knowing it.

The patients with the undetected allergy had more arterial plaque than the ones without, and, most worrisome to the researchers, their plaques were of a type that is more likely to break away from the arterial wall and cause heart attacks and strokes. Though the research is early — done in one group of 118 patients, in a known hotspot for alpha-gal — Platts-Mills worries it presages a risk for heart disease that is larger than anyone expects.

When a new disease surfaces in the USA, it’s usually the CDC that investigates, pouring epidemiologists and data scientists into the field to track down connections and bring back samples for lab analysis. But investigation of alpha-gal is caught in a bureaucratic quirk of federal science. The CDC is responsible for infections spread by insects and arthropods — but alpha-gal syndrome is not an infection. That makes it the responsibility of NIH — which has abundant lab scientists, but no shoe-leather disease detectives.

NIH does seem to be taking an interest. In June 2018, it hosted an invitation-only one-day IgE-mediated Meat Allergy Workshop; in the past, such meetings have indicated the giant agency is considering launching a research programme. But just reading the workshop’s programme provides a hint of how new alpha-gal research is; participants called the problem by multiple different names, displaying that there isn’t even yet any agreed nomenclature for it. Similarly, the US-run universal search engine for journal articles, PubMed, indexes papers on alpha-gal under “allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose”, “mammalian meat allergy”, “delayed red meat allergy”, “galactose-α-1,3-galactose syndrome” and more.

Platts-Mills was one of the workshop’s invited speakers and gave the opening statement. Commins was there as well, along with researchers from New York, Germany, South Africa and Sweden.

Dr Marshall Plaut, who convened the meeting and is now chief of the Food Allergy, Atopic Dermatitis, and Allergic Mechanisms Section at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describes it as the earliest step in possibly committing to a research programme. (Platts-Mills and Commins have already received some NIH funding.) “It signals that NIH has some interest in understanding more about the disease,” he says. “There are a lot of things that need to be understood.”

In August, Commins gave a talk on alpha-gal allergy at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a conference held every two or so years and sponsored by the CDC that often surfaces the earliest signals of illnesses that are destined to become big problems.

The CDC’s director of foodborne illness was in the audience; so was its director of vector-borne diseases, the department that deals with ticks. Afterwards, they both zoomed up to ask him questions. “I kind of had the impression this was just a weird, small thing,” Dr Lyle Petersen, the vector-borne director, told him. “But this seems like kind of a big deal.”

With NIH and the CDC paying attention, research into alpha-gal might be reaching a threshold, a moment at which isolated investigations might coalesce into answers. For the patients, who feel isolated too, that can’t come soon enough.

#health tips #health & fitness #allergy

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tepiddreamer · 6 years ago

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No, please, just no. I mean I get it, what better way to spread the ideas of veganism than to spread incorrect information about a key ingredient on one of Americas favorite foods, THE ALMIGHTY PIZZA.

But you know if you used actual factual data, and correct images (cause that baby sure doesn’t look kidnapped to me), and not belittle or talk back to the people who reply to you, then maybe you could make a positive influence on someone.

1. Insemination practices on a dairy farm are safer for the female than natural insemination by a bull. The cow can be injured by the bull during mating, or even harassed and skip meals. Insemination and palpation of a pregnant cow takes minutes, and the cows are placed under less stress during the procedure. Also most insemination uses controlled genetics now, based on the body type of the female (wide hips, long or crooked tail, milk production) making sure that the calf has the highest genetic viability at birth compared to uncontrolled factors in a pasture.

2. Yes calves are usually removed within 24 hours. Most females will be raised for future dairy production, while most males will be used for Veal. Some will be sold to other farmers. Weaning calves however can cause injury to the mother, so farms where calves are left with the cows are fitted with special nose pieces to hasten the weaning process. It is a plastic tag that fits on the nose, it is not pierced, and can be easily be removed by pulling on it. The calf can eat hay and drink water just fine.

3. Current stock of dairy cows are selectively bred, both naturally and artificially to produce the most milk possible. Today the average cow can produce 4x more milk daily than her calf would ever drink. Some breeds of cows can produce milk up to 10 months after the calf is removed, peaking production around 40-50 days. Females are given a rest period before being inseminated again.

4. Cheese can be fattening, this is true. But not all ‘cheese’ is bad cheese, in fact some of the more harmful cheeses out there are made with oil and non-dairy ingredients. Some cheeses are high in saturated fats, although others are high in calcium, zinc, and various vitamins. Just like any other foods, cheese eaten in moderation and healthy exercise is fine.

5. Casomorphins. Yes, you can be hopelessly addicted to cheese due to this pesky protein. Cheese literally becomes a drug to some people, it has a opioid effect on the brain. It makes you feel good when you eat it, some people it gives overwhelming brain chemicals and causes a addiction. Casomorphins can be passed from mother to child during breast feeding if the mother consumes large amounts of milk. There is a small link between Casomorphins and SIDS. Any milk protein consumed, including bovine/sheep/water buffalo milk, can contain Casomorphins. If you have strong or sudden cravings of cheese, or become euphoric or have intense feelings after eating cheese, you have a Casomorphin addiction. Again, moderation.

6. Estrogen in dairy. Yes there is estrogen hormones in dairy products. However this is one of those fear mongering topics, like the belief that too much yeast can make you ill or fat(unproven fact). There has been no scientific study that normal estrogen consumption of dairy products can cause cancer or early puberty or damages reproduction. In fact most estrogen consumed in dairy products is lower than what a human will produce in a days normal cycle. Unless you are chugging gallons of milk everyday for several months at a time will you possible see a difference, and at that point you will have other issues to worry about. Most hormones and drugs are destroyed in the digestion process anyways, so again there is little that escapes the stomach to be absorbed into the body. The higher the fat content of the milk fat, the higher the estrogen level, for example Vitamin D milk will have a higher level than 2% or Fat Free. The more a dairy product has been modified or aged the amount of estrogen it will contain. Aged cheeses, greater than 6 months, have little to no lactose or estrogen remaining.

7. As you age, you are naturally unable to process lactose as well as when you were a child. There is a huge difference between lactose intolerance and a milk allergy. As a child you will consume more lactose products as they are key nutrients to healthy growth. When you are a adult you consume less lactose and your body losses its natural ability to process it. Those that consume milk on daily basis are less likely to develop a lactose intolerance, although a intolerance can occur at any age during adulthood. Drinking a lactose free milk is a good option

8. There is no nutritional difference between Organic and regular milk. It literally is a industry ‘buzz-word’

9. Dairy does have a high fat content, although there are plenty of lean milk, cheese, and yogurt products available. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle and watching your caloric intake is key.

I have nothing against well educated vegans, in fact it is those same WELL EDUCATED people that have made positive changes in the slaughter and raising of animals. But if you choose to eat meat than think about where your food comes from and how it was raised/slaughtered. Ethical treatment and humane slaughter are real and produce better tasting milk and meat. Look to your local farmer for beef and poultry. Or even better, cut out one animal based meal a week, and replace with a vegetarian option. It is better not only for the environment, but for you as well. Too much meat can make you unhealthy if you are not very active. The mass production of factory farms is also detrimental to our environment, so less demand on factory farms means a smaller overall impact.

I personally cannot eat Beef, and can’t handle dairy very well, so I kinda live off poultry and fish. But I make sure that I know where my food comes from and that things are being done correctly. It costs a bit more, but its some of the best tasting chicken I have ever had. Farmers markets are awesome too, local produce that is fresh and cheaper than big chain stores.

Do your research, animal or plant based lives, it is your decision. Make a educated decision.

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brolikeidkman · 7 years ago

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An ex friend of mine tried to reach out to me and this will be a post about why I will not speak to her (TRIGGER WARNING:SELF HARM, REFERENCES TO RAPE CULTURE, GENERAL INSURGENT HOMOPHOBIA)

So she reached out to me and I have severe reasons why I completely cut her out of my life. The stories will be numbered. the first one is the longest the rest are pretty short.

#1. The Birthday party.

First, she was always giving off a bad vibe. Not just being a generally grumpy person because I can( and have) dealt with that kind of thing before. She had a ton of drama that came with her because, to be honest, she is a damaged person (None of which was her fault or was a problem for the most part).

The problems that came with her problems was that she created them. Her mental issues caused her to act out in a desperate plea for attention. Now, im a very caring person and I can say that with pride because I have worked hard to be one and I don’t say it lightly. Despite how caring I am I can no longer bring myself to help her because of the way she treated the people around her and me.

First, im going to tell you about my thirteenth birthday party. This is kind of in the middle of all the stuff she did but ill try and keeps all the other events in order so you can see the build up.

So the birthday party was big for me as it was a sleepover and the first birthday party I was having with friends since the first grade. Now as I said, this was a sleepover, so I told all six of my friends that my house didn't have enough room for no one to sleep on the floor and if need be I would sleep in my bed or two people could sleep in my bed and we all discussed how the sleeping arrangements and we figured out where and how everyone would be sleeping. She had volunteered to sleep on the floor. When she got to my house she showed up with no sleep clothes, no blanket, and no pillows. So a bad start. Now I wasn’t going to get upset about it because it wasn't a big deal, but the problems didn't stop there. One of my friends I invited has a very severe allergy to milk so we ordered her her own pizza without cheese. So why did this have anything to do with ex-friend? Because she would not stop commenting on how much of a burden it was. She said we should have just ordered it half cheese and half no cheese(despite the fact that this could have hospitalized my friend) or how she should have brought her own food. (who the fuck does that.)

Then came the presents.

Two of my friends didn't get me a gift because I made it very clear if you don't know what to get me or don't think you can you don't have to get me a gift (the actual wording was “company preferred than presents”). She, however, thought present should be mandatory. My dairy allergic friend got me a stuffed animal that I still have to this day, my ex-friend that has an allergy to sawdust (which comes in later) got me a ten dollar target gift card. My artist friend gave me a drawing (which I think I still have somewhere). Now, my friend that has an allergy to sawdust (which comes in later), She got me this HUGE multicolored crayon. WHICH I LOVED! I had a really close friend in my childhood who used to make them and it was such a fond memory. this friend actually felt really bad about the gift because she thought I wouldn't like it. As I was about to tell her about just why it was so awesome the ex-friend interrupted and said that she could have given me the receipt. Which she had. The ex-friend made comments to the two that didn't bring presents that hey should have. One of them was a friend of mine for five years before (it would have been longer but I had only known her since the moment I moved in you know.) Not only had this friend already gotten me a present she was also waiting for my actual birthday to give me another present (my birthday is in the summer so it was easier to have a birthday party a month early so I could keep contact for plans inside school) so I was pretty mad but I didn't say anything to the ex-friend because I knew she would start a fight. My old friend is very understanding about this when I tell her this.

The cake went well and there wasn't a problem because we had gotten my dairy allergic friend sherbert ( think this what its called its basically shaved ice sold like ice cream).

Then we had downtime. We played Guitar hero, played Jenga and some suggested we go outside before my art friend had to leave because she couldn't spend the night. Which was good except for two of them. The first was you-know-who and the other was my friend who is allergic to sawdust. She asked if we had done any work on our house and I said no, but that our neighbors had recently sawed down a tree.

I pointed out where it was to her and it isn't close to my house it's on the opposite side of their yard so she said it was okay and I told her to let me know if something was wrong. Now my ex-friend. Not to step on any toes here but I don't believe Ouija boards work. That being said, if someone else believes that they do work im not going to tell them otherwise. She believed they worked but she's an idiot. She told me she couldn't go outside because demons will kill her because she left a bord without saying goodbye and she was alone.(aren't those basic rules?) So we said she didn't have to go outside (which honestly was rude but we needed a break from her at this point). And then she went outside. And pretending she was possessed by demons. Which you know isn't that bad but then she had fits of crying and screaming. And then she did something that is the main reason I bringing this story up. She went to my neighbors' yard and grabbed a handful of the sawdust. AND STARTED CHASING MY FRIEND WITH IT. My friends' sawdust allergy as far from mild she would break out in hives and she had asthma. She also can’t run well because one of her legs is significantly shorter than the other. My ex-friend knew all of these things. So I tackled her. Which went better than I thought it would because she blamed it on the demons so I sent her inside to wash her hands and told my mom to make sure she did and to let me know when she did so we could go back in. My artist friends mom picked her up and then we watched a few movies, played some Minecraft and more guitar hero. Ex-friends mom picked her up at four am.

#2. You cant be that because I said so ... (warning: insurgent homophobia)

This was the year gay marriage was passed. When my friend told me about it it was a slap in the face because I hadn't known being gay was even an option. I welcomed it with warm arms and I got to know a lot of my friends closer through it and I learned a ton from them and learned a lot about my parents' views (which aren't good). Now my ex-friend (let's just call her X) decided that she wanted to explore her sexuality more and identified, in this order, as: Lesbian, genderfluid, bisexual, lesbian, trans, gay, genderfluid, no longer trans, lesbian, pansexual, bisexual.

All of this was fine with me, and though I thought it was odd she kept jumping labels so much and so rapidly I was still there for her because I knew sexuality is a hard thing to pin down.

During this time, however, she did many things I will never tolerate:

X told one of my friends he could not be gay because she wanted to have sexual relations with him.

Said that a questioning genderfluid couldn't be genderfluid because he didn’t feel it the same way she does. (He figured out he just really loves drag and now identifies with his birth gender wholely as well as being bisexual)

X Said that a girl was ugly because she refused to send naked photos

Stated genderfluid people don't exist (only after she decided she wasn't)

Called the cops on my friends' mom saying she was a heroin addict.

X Told a teacher she would call the cops and tell them he asked for photos if he didn't put in the grade for an assignment she didn't do (I hated that teacher but this was days after X asked the girl for photos so I talked to the guidance counselor who got the cops involved and the teacher let them look into his messages and emails and they couldn't find a trace of interaction with her besides asking her to turn in a big assignment. I found out what happened a year later after the guidance counselor retired when she thanked me for stopping a potential problem and for never causing one. I thanked her for not involving me as a witness for the police.)

X said multiple times that she willingly had sex with an older male (which worried us to all hell and we told the new guidance counselor this many times. He was later fired without a public reason)

Then X decided that she would be the one to pick which sexuality suited me best.

I don't think there is anything wrong with helping someone find an identity that suits them but not when it's unwanted and isn't helping them work it out themselves by picking the actual label themselves. She was just labeling me as she thought I should be.

She decided that I am asexual. This was very offensive to me NOT because I think badly of ANY sexuality but because:

A: I am not asexual

B: I did not ask her for advice she just came up to me and said it.

C: Said she knew an asexual when she saw one.

D: Continued to tell people I was.

I now identify as Polyamorous Aromantic.

I also was told by a friend that X was telling people that I had sex with X and that she “helped me figure out I am asexual because I didn't like it”, I could never confirm this was spread by her, but Its highly possible as she had said something similar to me about another girl. (I am to this day a virgin btw)

She told multiple people they had been faking their sexualities to go with a new trend.

#3: The Biggest reason. (WARNING: Non-graphic self-harm main topic)

After all that happened in #2 I had stopped being friends with X but this is why I completely cut her out of my life before she got expelled.

During this time I had severe depression and my family couldn't afford to get me help. I had one friend that I was really close to and he had severe mental issues including depression, bipolar disorder and he also was being physically abused by his grandfather and was mentally abused by his mom which he hid from his dad who he only saw every other weekend.

Unfortunately, he was also a cutter. He has scars now on his arms and legs and he confessed to me that he had tried to kill himself on a few occasions. He was my closest friend and he is much better nowadays. This is the questioning genderfluid friend I talked about in #2 that X said was wrong.

Honestly, I could have gotten over every other reason that I will not talk to her except this one.

Heres what happened.

She drew cut marks on her arms and legs and said: “Hey look I’m (Cutter Friend)!”

There is a big difference between kids being mean and people who you think are your friends calling you out.

After that happened most of my friends stopped talking to her completely and if she sat at our table we would leave.

She decided she should start to actually cut herself and blame us and say we told her to do so.

Then one day she tripped me in the hall. (To be honest, I don't know why she tripped me to this day) She started doing things like this all the time she told the counselor I was cutting myself and smoking cigarettes (which led to my stuff getting searched and her getting detention when they asked me why she would say that I had them).

When she relised she couldnt target me without getting in trouble she decided to start targeting my friend.

By this time he was doing so much better. His grandfaather had died, he told his dad about his mom, and he had mostly stopped cutting unless something triggered it.

Triggered like when someone asked about it. Or when someone called him a slur.

So X decided to go up to him, grab his wrists, push up his sleeves, rake her acrilic nails down his scars and ask “What are the best brand of razors to use? Mine never cut deep enough. Should we swallow some?”

He tried to kill himself when he got home. He had to be rescued by his dad and emts after he overdosed and tried to drown himself in his bathtub. He he kept his clothes on so his dad didn’t have to see him dead and naked. He was in the hospital for a week. That was when I started cutting.

Its my worst memory.

She eventually was expelled after she threatened multiple teachers.

When we got to Highschool she got expelled after two months for drug use, dealing, bringing alcholol into the building and eventually threatening a shooting.

She now is saying shes coming back to my school and I refuse to respond.

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