Damn You Special K! Semi-delerious Rant Ahead.
Wondering why I've been relatively inactive here on LJ? Well I've been sick. And it all started because I was trying to do something healthy. I was trying to get my weight under control. I'm the biggest I've ever been, including pregnancies. Big enough it's affecting my health and lifestyle. Calling me overweight would be kind. I'm damned fat.
So...A few weeks ago, I decided to tackle my weakest point of the day. Late afternoon. I usually arrive home from work ravenous and end up overeating. I actually eat pretty healthy the rest of the day. I have tried eating a bigger lunch, but it backfires on me...I wind up sleepy and have trouble keeping up with the second half of my workday. So I pick up some Special K Protien water. Tackles three issues: Protien and fiber should control the hungries, I drink too much caffiene and not enough water, and it shouldn't spike my blood sugar since I'm insulin resistant/prediabetic/borderline (take your pick.)
I start drinking it on Monday of Master's Week. It made me a little queasy on an empty stomach and the fiber definitely had some effect on me. But it does curb the hungries and I keep drinking it. Thursday, I'm not feeling so hot and come home to take a nap. I wake up covered in hives from neck to upper thighs. Awful itchy hives that are enough to wake me up. Argh! I swallow two benedryl and hubby pages my doctor. With a combination of Claritin and benedryl I manage not to scratch myself bloody until they go away. Friday, I gave away the remainder of my protien water. By Easter Sunday, I was pretty much back to normal. Which was good because I got shanghaied into two separate family dinners.
The itching and the need for round the clock dosing had disrupted my sleep schedule, so I dragged ass for the first half of last week. Smallspawn was sick with something or another but it cleared up on it's own. So when I started feeling icky on Thursday, I thought I'd caught whatever he had. By my lunchbreak on Friday, I was having fever and chills. But I'd already made it through half my day, so I stuck it out for the rest of the shift. Besides, I wasn't sure where to find the right person to tell I needed to go home and it seemed easier just to sit there huddled under my blazer, sweater, and little fleece blankie (it's pink...shh!)
And what followed was a miserable weekend of chills, high fevers up to 103 degrees, getting drenched in sweat when a fever "broke" and came down to a paltry 99-100 degrees for a few hours. Achiness, lethargy, not wanting to eat because the food just seemed to sit there like a brick, twinges that felt like gas pains, burping after foods that normally don't make me burp, having to go to the bathroom so often it almost felt like diarrhea but little or nothing happens. Not quite sick enough for a trip to the ER or Urgent Care Center, but constantly thinking....OK. If it goes any higher, I'll have to go. Or if it doesn't start coming down after this dose, I'll have to go.
By Sunday, it was clear it wasn't what the baby had and was probably some sort of infection. My first guess was UTI, though I didn't have the obvious symptoms. But there's few things that will make me burn up like that. I might have given in and headed for the nearest Urgent Care Center, except that during one of my "breaks" I took a nap...And woke up four hours later. Not likely to find anything but the ER open then. So I called my boss and made plans to see a doc today.
I went in and started telling the nurse my symptoms. She was about to leave and do whatever nurses do when they leave you when she asked me if I thought I had a UTI. I said it reminded me of what happened when I had one before. Or at least that I was almost certain I had an infection of some kind and if it wasn't a UTI, I was baffled. (If you don't know what one is, then you are damned lucky -- Uriniary Tract Infection.) So she almost rushes me into the bathroom to do the old pee in a cup drill.
"Gory" details: My best effort wound up being a small amount of very dark gold liquid that tested positive for both blood and white blood cells. It can be hard to judge color and quantity when you are not catching it in a cup and it just goes down the toilet like it's supposed to. And I have been sweating so badly I think I've lost three or four pounds of water weight since last week. The swelling in my ankles has actually gone down for the first time in forever. Not completely, but noticeably. So darker than usual urine wasn't necessarily a big signal or even obvious to me.
Talking my symptoms over with the doctor, he thought it sounded like I might have some infection in my GI tract, too. He asked me if I'd eaten or drank anything unusual lately...Bingo. Told him about the damned protien water debacle. He thought it likely that this infection is fall out from my reaction to it. So now I'm on an antibiotic that should work on both kinds of infection.
But, I may get sicker before I get better. Reading the patient leaflet, this drug can cause nausea and some of the other symptoms I was already having. Plus dizzyness. Joy. And I shouldn't take NSAIDs like Ibuprofen and Naproxen with it. And that is a problem because Tylenol alone wasn't enough to keep my fever below even 100.
So...No more protien water of any kind for me. No more Special K products. And I'm leery of any artificial drink that I haven't been drinking on a semi-regular or more frequent basis. This is the very first time I've had an allergic reaction to any kind of food or drink, so I had no reason at all to expect it. I don't know what component or components affected me, but I'm not willing to experiment to find out. Not if this is the consequence!
Shit. All I was trying to do was take better care of mysefl. Grr...
So...A few weeks ago, I decided to tackle my weakest point of the day. Late afternoon. I usually arrive home from work ravenous and end up overeating. I actually eat pretty healthy the rest of the day. I have tried eating a bigger lunch, but it backfires on me...I wind up sleepy and have trouble keeping up with the second half of my workday. So I pick up some Special K Protien water. Tackles three issues: Protien and fiber should control the hungries, I drink too much caffiene and not enough water, and it shouldn't spike my blood sugar since I'm insulin resistant/prediabetic/borderline (take your pick.)
I start drinking it on Monday of Master's Week. It made me a little queasy on an empty stomach and the fiber definitely had some effect on me. But it does curb the hungries and I keep drinking it. Thursday, I'm not feeling so hot and come home to take a nap. I wake up covered in hives from neck to upper thighs. Awful itchy hives that are enough to wake me up. Argh! I swallow two benedryl and hubby pages my doctor. With a combination of Claritin and benedryl I manage not to scratch myself bloody until they go away. Friday, I gave away the remainder of my protien water. By Easter Sunday, I was pretty much back to normal. Which was good because I got shanghaied into two separate family dinners.
The itching and the need for round the clock dosing had disrupted my sleep schedule, so I dragged ass for the first half of last week. Smallspawn was sick with something or another but it cleared up on it's own. So when I started feeling icky on Thursday, I thought I'd caught whatever he had. By my lunchbreak on Friday, I was having fever and chills. But I'd already made it through half my day, so I stuck it out for the rest of the shift. Besides, I wasn't sure where to find the right person to tell I needed to go home and it seemed easier just to sit there huddled under my blazer, sweater, and little fleece blankie (it's pink...shh!)
And what followed was a miserable weekend of chills, high fevers up to 103 degrees, getting drenched in sweat when a fever "broke" and came down to a paltry 99-100 degrees for a few hours. Achiness, lethargy, not wanting to eat because the food just seemed to sit there like a brick, twinges that felt like gas pains, burping after foods that normally don't make me burp, having to go to the bathroom so often it almost felt like diarrhea but little or nothing happens. Not quite sick enough for a trip to the ER or Urgent Care Center, but constantly thinking....OK. If it goes any higher, I'll have to go. Or if it doesn't start coming down after this dose, I'll have to go.
By Sunday, it was clear it wasn't what the baby had and was probably some sort of infection. My first guess was UTI, though I didn't have the obvious symptoms. But there's few things that will make me burn up like that. I might have given in and headed for the nearest Urgent Care Center, except that during one of my "breaks" I took a nap...And woke up four hours later. Not likely to find anything but the ER open then. So I called my boss and made plans to see a doc today.
I went in and started telling the nurse my symptoms. She was about to leave and do whatever nurses do when they leave you when she asked me if I thought I had a UTI. I said it reminded me of what happened when I had one before. Or at least that I was almost certain I had an infection of some kind and if it wasn't a UTI, I was baffled. (If you don't know what one is, then you are damned lucky -- Uriniary Tract Infection.) So she almost rushes me into the bathroom to do the old pee in a cup drill.
"Gory" details: My best effort wound up being a small amount of very dark gold liquid that tested positive for both blood and white blood cells. It can be hard to judge color and quantity when you are not catching it in a cup and it just goes down the toilet like it's supposed to. And I have been sweating so badly I think I've lost three or four pounds of water weight since last week. The swelling in my ankles has actually gone down for the first time in forever. Not completely, but noticeably. So darker than usual urine wasn't necessarily a big signal or even obvious to me.
Talking my symptoms over with the doctor, he thought it sounded like I might have some infection in my GI tract, too. He asked me if I'd eaten or drank anything unusual lately...Bingo. Told him about the damned protien water debacle. He thought it likely that this infection is fall out from my reaction to it. So now I'm on an antibiotic that should work on both kinds of infection.
But, I may get sicker before I get better. Reading the patient leaflet, this drug can cause nausea and some of the other symptoms I was already having. Plus dizzyness. Joy. And I shouldn't take NSAIDs like Ibuprofen and Naproxen with it. And that is a problem because Tylenol alone wasn't enough to keep my fever below even 100.
So...No more protien water of any kind for me. No more Special K products. And I'm leery of any artificial drink that I haven't been drinking on a semi-regular or more frequent basis. This is the very first time I've had an allergic reaction to any kind of food or drink, so I had no reason at all to expect it. I don't know what component or components affected me, but I'm not willing to experiment to find out. Not if this is the consequence!
Shit. All I was trying to do was take better care of mysefl. Grr...