All in my head?

I'm reading a book titled "Gut and Psychology Syndrome" written by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride MD, MMedSci(neurology), MMedSci(nutrition).


The premise of the author is that the state of health of the gut contributes to and can even be the cause of multiple illnesses, including classic illnesses like Depression, Schizophrenia, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Ulcerative Colitis, Eczema, Chrons Disease, Celiacs Disease, asthma, allergies, ADHD, ADD and Autism, her focus being on Autism.


She describes the anatomy of a healthy gut, several studies done by gastroenterologists and what that means to people who suffer from these diseases. Also what it means to people who are seemingly asymptomatic but who find improved health and immune function after following the diet she outlines in her book. 


Without going into too much detail, people with abnormal gut flora, such as Bifidobacteria, Lactobacteria, Propionobacteria, physiological strains of E.Coli, Peptostreptococci and Enterococci, have guts susceptible to attack by "Opportunistic Flora," such as Bacteroids, Petococci, Staphylococci, Streptococci, Bacilli, Clostridia, Yeasts, Enterobacteria (Proteus, Clebsielli, Citrobacteria, etc.), Fuzobacteria, Eubacteria, Catenobacteria, and many others. 

"In a healthy person their numbers are limited and are tightly controlled by the beneficial flora. Each of these microbes is capable of causing various health problems if they get out of control."


What this means is that the Opportunistic Flora can cause inflammation of the lining in the gut, and this inflammation triggers an immune response by the lymph nodes causing them release a lot of lymphocytes to fight the infection.


One of the signs that the gut isn't functioning properly is that of digestive problems, sometimes quite severe. Colic, bloating, flatulence, diarrhea, constipation, feeding difficulties and malnourishment, all to various degrees. Many people with intestinal issues also have fussy eating habits, refusing a whole lot of foodstuffs and limiting their diet to a handful of foods, usually starchy and sweet : breakfast cereals, chips, popcorn, cakes, cookies, sweets, bananas, bread, rice, sweet yogurts, ice cream etc. Most of the children Dr. Campbell-McBride has studied refuse to eat vegetables, fruit (apart from bananas), meats, fish and eggs. About 60-70% of the autistic children she has seen in her clinic have extremely limited diets.


Although the connection between gut inflammation and autism is well established the studies done on this subject became subject to a lot of controversy when the gasteroenterologist Dr. Wakefield and his team decided to see whether or not the MMR vaccine had anything to do with the inflammation of the lymph nodes. Suspecting that it might be the measles virus, (Dr. Wakefield) involved a well-known virolohist Dr John O' Leary, a professor of pathology form Dublin. Sure enough Dr. O'Leary found the same measles virus used in the MMR vaccine in the ileal lymph nods of the autistic children (in Dr. Wakefields study). This caused vigorous resistance from government and the medical establishment which distacted attention from the main issue.


At this point I would like to stop in my discussion of this book. At some point the description of the pain that the children Dr. Campbell-McBride has seen in her clinic brought to mind my own pain as I was growing up. I have the ability to communicate, a lot of autistic children cannot communicate very well, their pain causes them to scream in pain at times, to act up at times, to push there belly's against hard surfaces to relieve the pressure.

I have done just that, lain on the hard edge of that couch and rocked back and forth to relieve the pain in my stomach. As a child I remember lying on the couch at dinner time and complaining about my stomach hurting, I felt so helpless, my parents thought I was being difficult. I used to walk home from school, burping along the way with a noxious sulfuric gas coming up. I remember hanging on the door knob of the bathroom door and sitting on the toilet bent over in pain. I remember having really hard stools that sometimes I wouldn't pass a stool for days and it would really hurt and sometimes having diarrhea that would burn my bottom. I remember going for shots before Kindergarten and then sitting in the car afterwords pressing my forehead against the seat belt to soothe the dizziness and throbbing headache that I had. I remember having a hard time knowing what to do with my arms as I walked I felt awkward, unsteady, I liked to have a wall or hand rail to cling to. I had a great deal of depression, I spent the most part of my freshman and senior year at high school walking home falling into an exhausted black sleep and/or crying. Not to mention the many years before that as a child with depression, I cried almost every night that I didn't get how to make friends, that no one liked me, that I felt sick.

If ONLY someone would have known about the diet presented in this book at that time. I would have been healed! My childhood would have been happier and easier.

IF ONLY someone would have known about this diet and had put me and my brothers and my sister on it! Instead of medication, HEALING!! My STARS my brothers! My poor brother Jonathan could have had a more normal life. NO Autism!! IMAGINE? He would be married now, he would have a life!! Evan, he wouldn't have been hopped up on Ritalin! My sister Kelsey has had the pickiest diet that I know of, she had continually complained about stomach problems, has missed school and been in pain. 

I, am going to go on this diet.

After the stomach and intestines are healed I will be able to eat a lot more grains and spices than I can now, and I will have less sensitivity to other foods.

I know, and have always known that people are resistant to change, I wish I could get my family to try this out, even my children... but I cannot force them to hear what they don't want to hear. It is like when God had Moses make a fiery serpent and set it upon a pole. If anyone was bitten by a snake they could "Look upon it and live." But what about those who did not believe? They would refuse to look and would thus die.

I think that faith as a whole involves looking beyond what is seemingly obvious, and looking to that which you have NOT heard before, or read before... thinking about and considering what other people have to say. LOOK and LIVE, and then ACT.

Thought For the New Year

I have a lot of thoughts in my mind tonight as the New Year approaches. A lot of times conveying them through the written word destroys the essence of thought. Thought is a multilayered process involving not only the words in your mind but also the emotions in your heart, thus hard to convey. Plus there’s something about the written word that tempts corrections to be continually made.

It is storming outside; I hope that all of the bluster will bring in some snow. It’s been unseasonably warm, first unseasonably cold, now the opposite. I was watching 3 Idiots before now, the movie, not some random people I am deriding… the  moving makes a bold statement about following what you love instead of becoming like a machine, cramming; I’ve always had a lovely hidden belief in the philosophy of following your heart yet am a crammer at times, the tendency can create a lot of stress. Through college, through life, it’s all been about cramming it all in. Occasionally what I love creeps in though.

Like writing, it’s something that is enjoyable to me but it can become stressful to me as well if I overthink it. Mostly I get too tired to write though, it’s hard to create the mood for writing, and sometimes I’m afraid to write what I’m truly thinking and feeling.

Fear and doubt come in many different guises, belief is a powerful thing as well. I feel sad right now, why? Because I cannot explain  why my heart sometimes desires something different than what my head does, why I say I want one thing but when I’ve received it look jealously at what I decided not to choose. I cannot explain, some things simply are what they are.

One thing though that I know about myself is that I’ve always hated complacency. When I was a little girl I was the one trying to climb over the gate in the hallway simply because it was there when the other kids were happy doing something else.

I’ve always been a bit out of step with everyone else and I’ve always reached upward. My drawback is that I reach beyond what is necessary. When I was a kid I hated being in school, I often had bad stomach aches and preferred to be home, so I would slip out of class and/or beg to be left at home. I wasn’t content with watching cartoons all day though, sometimes I would watch them, but then I would find documentaries to watch or educational television. I would pile my Dad’s books up high because I wanted to know what was in them, I wanted to conquer them. In a way I felt that if I knew it all I would be left alone to do what I wanted to do.

That didn’t work well, I didn’t really learn much from the high level math books, encyclopedias and Morris Code tapes… I was reaching beyond the mark I felt harassed by the educational system, my personality didn’t thrive in the structured and I thought arbitrary environment of public school. I like to see the big picture; I felt that if I couldn’t see the whole picture then I couldn’t follow the parts of things that they wanted to teach me particularly grammar and math!!

I just wanted to escape and learn things on my own. I felt that if I could conquer the knowledge of everything they wanted me to know then I would be free. I begged my mind to keep reading, however difficult and boring the subject was. I told myself that if I gave any subject I was studying a chance then it would become interesting to me, this was and is true it’s a neat trick, but it can only be taken so far.

SO what would I have studied if I had felt free to learn whatever I wanted (no fear of impending doom of inadequacy). I like reading about whatever I feel like reading about at the moment, currently I’ve been reading (or listening to anyway) Bulfinches Mythology, “The Age of Fable” which is about Greek Mythology and some Norwegian mythology as well.

When I was younger it was hard for me to concentrate, I wanted to learn but I couldn’t focus. I used to organize the books in the bookshelf in our Family Room, from largest to smallest, then I would try organizing them alphabetically, then by color. I found organizing them from largest to smallest worked the best; usually I would try organizing them largest to smallest within category or alphabetically but that never worked out quite like I wanted it to. I enjoyed being a librarian in Junior High. The only thing about this tendency to organize is that I’ve found it to be an excuse to avoid something else. It’s a soothing exercise to me, makes me feel in control. Unfortunately I’ve missed out on a lot of things because I felt that I needed order before I could feel secure enough for something else. I know my weakness and my strength here though, it’s not something I need pointed out to me. Which brings me to another weakness, a tendency to abhor being told what to do. I heard someone remark recently that people generally work on themselves and it’s hard to hear someone pointing at your glaring faults. True, but it’s hard to stop yourself from pointing things out, especially when you think the other person needs a reminder, or you want them to sway them to see things your way. I’m terrible at taking criticism and I’m terrible at handing out advice. On the one hand I know I need to change something but don’t want someone pointing at it. On the other hand I want others to listen to me, sometimes I think I’m right and really wish they’d listen. Sometimes I know I’m right, sometimes I think I know in any case it’s hard to be tactful and avoid pride on either the giving or receiving side of advice. Then there is pressure, when I’m being pressured to do something or decide something I usually want to get away from that pressure, if I feel unable to make a decision I will hedge, if the answer is no but the other person will be disappointed I stall, in many cases these tendencies have not served me well. They are hard habits to break though. Ha, there’s a thought, I just glanced at a book I bought in 2008 “The New York Times ~ The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008” that was the year I wanted to homeschool my kids, I took Sione out of Kindergarten to try teaching him, that was the year my life was shattered, homeschooling didn’t work out that year, despite all of my zeal. It felt like a freight train was headed my way and I was helpless to stop it, try as I might. I saw some of it coming but didn’t see it all. Some things are unexplainable, some things just happen, who can give a satisfactory reason as to why? There are explanations for a lot of things, but a lot of times the reasoning behind the actions doesn’t make sense. Maybe if I had done things differently and had married someone else things would have never happened as they did, not a guarantee but better thought out decisions usually lead to better outcomes. I’ve been fighting to rise above the consequence of the decisions that I made when I was a young teenager. I’ve been fighting to rise, and I have in many ways, but it’s cost a LOT, basically blood, sweat and tears… to be dramatic. I don’t want my children to go through the same thing. When I was first married I had nothing, no means of support, my Grandmother gave me $1000 dollars, and we had random wedding gifts, but I ended up having to pay off my new husbands debts, and trying to figure him out. I had no money to buy furniture, so I bought what I could at yard sales, put a $120 dollar table on layaway at Wal-Mart and dragged a couple of couches that someone had left behind after moving across the street to my parents carport. I sewed up the rips in the fabric, put the chairs and microwave that I had bought at a yard sale next to the couches and then covered all with a tarp. I spent a long time sewing up the rips in the couches, but I was glad to do it because the couches matched and they were free. Then my husband was gone, his family sent him back to Tonga when he made a terrible mistake, when I demanded an explanation and no one could give me one. No wisdom, just rash action from the family. He was in Tonga for 9 months while I worked on getting him a Green Card. He came back after I had born our little girl Angie. Then more trials and tears came, and more work. We moved into a tiny apartment, I stayed home and tried to figure out the Tongan way of cooking, baked bread and stored food. Plus I read whatever I could get my hands on, it was a way to escape. We didn’t have money to buy the kids Christmas presents, I wanted to get them blocks, expensive at $60 dollars a set. So I bought a couple of 2X4’s and had my Dad cut them into the shape of blocks. Then I bought a hack saw and labored to make it cut half circles out of the bigger blocks. Then came the sanding, I sanded and sanded. Then I bought more 2X4’s and made a set for a lady down the street whose husband beat her and whose son had nothing as well. After that Christmas I decided to go back to school, I went into Behavioral Science because I wanted to understand “Why?” why people did what they did, why Sam did what he did, why my Dad, why my Mom, why my brothers and sister… why? I wanted to raise my children better than I had been raised; I wanted to sort out why I was always out of step with everyone else and what I could do to fix it. I made checklists of what I needed to do every day to be normal, some of the things on the list were to “Brush teeth, get a good haircut, cut fingernails, get to be on time, get up on time…” a whole list of things that I felt would help me to be normal if I was sure to do them all every day, part of the problem being that I was constantly in a dark cloud of depression and brain fog because of my unknown food sensitivities (a concept that I used to scoff at). I finished high school while bouncing a baby on my knees; I finished my associates’ degree in much the same way, taking night courses and TV courses, studying at odd hours. Studying the same words over and over because of compulsion and because the words wouldn’t stick in my fog laden brain. I still feel compelled at times to open text books I’ve previously read cover to cover because I have forgotten what they say exactly. Cramming works well for short term things like tests, but doesn’t work so well when trying to put the “knowledge” to work. I finished my associates in Behavioral Science then went on, I liked organizing so chose accounting as my next direction. I hated math though, math was a swirling vortex of incomprehension. Plus it was charged with negative feelings from not being able to get it when my Dad so wanted me to do well at math. I had to start over with math, I went through my elementary school text books and did each lesson, working up and up until finally I ended with Calculus. I got my BS in Accounting, I still feel inadequate in that respect sometimes, mostly because I’ve never had a good work experience after earning my degree, it’s a fallacy though that I should discard. The very fact that I could plough through all of that accounting homework scoring A’s, yes A’s, very few B’s, while going through tumult in my life is a testament really that setting the mind upon a goal can bring about miracles. Speaking of which I would be lax to discount the hand of God in my life, he was there, even when I couldn’t seem to see the light, he guided me. I went through poverty, bankruptcy, numerous miscarriages (14 at last count), and I had to deal with a smooth talking, lying husband. By George he’s so good at the art! It seems like yesterday that I was rushing to take pictures of my son Sione in his blessing gown (which he hollered through) before rushing off to Angies graduation from Head Start. My shy quiet little girl, she was so silent when she was little, she learned to be that way because when her brother got yelled at she found it was better to be quiet. My older children's lives while growing up is like a dream to me, I tried really hard to do things with my kids and I did do quite a lot with them, but being in school is like a time warp, it sucks in all of your energy and time and before you know it you’ve advanced 10-20 years. I’ve been “present” with my youngest child Roxie in much the same way, my life was full of too much stress to make living easy, but I tried to be there for her and do things with her when I could, I’m still trying. I still believe in the theory of following your heart. That’s why I didn’t keep pressing for an accounting job when this temporary position became available. It’s right up my ally, organizing information. I love it! I hope that the maxim to follow your heart will be taken though with a grain of wisdom, a lot of determination and hard work will lead (eventually) to a point when following the heart is a reality, instead of a wish that flitters through the mind as an afterthought. That’s all I’ve got to say on the subject for now…