Friday, September 29, 2006

Allergic to communion?

A heck of a week as I've been taking double doses of anti-histamines daily and that has meant a great deal of difficulty waking up in the morning.

I am bemused as to what it could be as I have stuck rigorously to my diet all week. Most disturbingly the problem of an inflamed eye which I had before diagnosis - and doing something about the problem - has returned, on and off. There is also inflammation and ulcers around the gums. More of that on another occasion perhaps.

I've been to a couple of buffets and been as cautious as possible.

Here are some clues:
communion bread - the merest crumb;
communion wine;
gluten-free gravy - contains unspecified vegetable protein;
pink salmon;
avocados with rape seed oil, daily for lunch.

As I cooked an omelette and bacon the other night with rape seed oil I tend to discard that.

So really bad news, it looks like avocado. Certainly today the symptoms seemed to return straight after lunch. That's bad news and suggest that new allergens are popping up sporadically. Can that happen? Surely it can as the whole business has just occurred out of the blue.

At the moment I am surviving mentally by believing it's all not going to last for very long, like flu. Because it is beginning to feel as though there may be very few foods I can eat. And what am I going to do about communion? Buy gluten free bread for the church every week - it would have to be weekly because the stuff does not last. In fact a sealed loaf I bought the other day was already mouldy.

As we are now in autumn, I am also wondering what happens when I get flu or even a cold. After all I'm already on anti-histamines. Are they symptomless or what?

I had a pleasant letter from the specialist earlier this week, copied to the GP. Clearly he tends to favour tomato as the main cause. He also suspects that tomato exclusion and even wheat exclusion will not be enough. Oh dear!

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