Penicillin and the dentist

This morning it looked as if the "ring" was fading. The redness round the edges had gone and it looked as though the skin might heal.

I wondered why it had suddenly healed. Perhaps it was the swine flu virus or the effect of fighting an infection in the teeth.

The best guess is that it was caused by blue cheese, as I ran out of Stilton in the middle of last week and had been eating it almost daily up to then. I had followed through the links on the subject, erythema annulare centrifugum and found a very detailed text book page. This would appear to summarise all the reports on this problem and there would appear to be limited links with salilcylate allergy or montelukast. There is however an established link with blue cheese. The site states that blue cheese causes a problem because of the fungus Penicillium. And a list of the drugs that causes the problem includes salicylates and penicillin.

Today, by coincidence, I finally went to the dentist. A series of sharp pains last week ended up in a dull ache in my lower back jaw. I used warm salty water and this seemed to clear the inflammation of the gums but it failed to remove the dull ache.Wisdom tooth, I thought.

My National Health Service dentist has gone private - so the bill for the day was not small. The dentist x-rayed me, removed a wisdom tooth from my upper jaw and gave me a deep clean. The pain, she blamed on food trapped in the gums causing an infection. She then gave me a prescription of antibiotics. I couldn't say I was allergic to penicillin. The thought had hardly crossed my mind - so I told her penicillin was okay.

The dentist, by the way, accepted I could not find a safe toothpaste or mouthwash. Otherwise, I think, she would have tried to treat the infection with mouthwash.

I also got my fresh prescription of montelukast. It's been that kind of day.

Tonight the ring is again inflamed. I think I'll have to put up with it for three days and hope it does not spread any more. If it does we'll have to add penicillin to everything else. And do without blue cheese, groan.

RAS

E45

My partner's been urging me to try E45 cream for a while now. So yesterday I did. I checked the ingredients first. It seems to contain palm oil, which would not be very good. However the ring on my chest was starting to tickle a little so I thought it worth a try. I went a little over the top and smeared it on the ring and also on the insides of my elbows. The immediate results were not promising - everything went red. The tickle's gone today but the ring remains inflamed. So I don't think E45 is sensible. We have another skin cream I am going to try - again the ingredients seem innocent but they also seem to be not as detailed as I would lack.

Looking back I'm reminded I cut back on montelukast because the ring, erythrema centrifugum, might be caused by a side-effect of drugs or by blue cheese. It didn't make any difference - all that seems to have happened is I've lost a sachet of pills so far as I can tell. Or else I'd used more than I thought since April. So I've had to order some more.

I'm now abstaining from stilton cheese in the faint hope that it might be the cause of the ring, rather than salicylate. Not much hope there and I'm worried it may be sprouting a second one. Uugh! I may even have to go to the doctor. Perhaps some sun-bathing would do the trick. My arms have been a great deal better since they got a dose of sunshine.

RAS

The sun shines!

 One factor I forgot to mention in my recent troubles - the sun. Perhaps because there has not been a great deal of it during the British summer in recent years.

Two weeks ago we went for a picnic on a blistering hot Sunday. In desperation I borrowed some sun tan lotion off someone. It's hardly any wonder I had trouble with my skin for the last couple of weeks and that the trouble has been mainly on the arms and the face.

Last summer or the summer before I went to quite a lot of trouble to find hypo-allergenic sun tan lotion. I can't find any record of it on this blog and in the end I did not have to use the stuff very much. But over the weekend I found some of this lotion in the house "for sensitive skin". I used it yesterday when I was outside all day and the sun was shining blistering hot again in between cloudy intervals. When I first put it on my skin went all red. I didn't apply it to my inner elbows and they got burnt by the sun. I applied it to my face and that was still quite burnt.

There doesn't seem to have been any longer run effects. I had a cold bath at the end of the day and my arms do not seem too bad. I need to check the ingredients of the stuff I am using.

RAS

Swine flu?

I have been wondering if I'm suffering from a dose of swine flu as it is around in our neighbourhood. I have been feeling dreadful all week.

Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe I drank too much Jack Daniels over the weekend. My experience over the winter was that the flu virus - if it was that - suppressed the immune system, led to other symptoms disappearing and allowed me much greater flexibility in my diet.

As of tonight, my arms look as though they're suffering from chicken pox. There have been a couple of breaches in the diet in the last few days but I have also been taking montelukast daily. Yesterday in desperation I took an anti-histamine and that may explain why I've been feeling groggy for the last 24 hours.

Leaving aside the whisky, I think it started on Sunday when we discovered we had run out of soy sauce. I was persuaded to try a cheap commercial chicken stock on the grounds the ingredients did not display any obvious salicylates, no herbs or anything.

Gravy was the problem a couple of days later when I went to a function. I asked if they could produce me a meal without sauces, herbs or spices. First the waitress told me they would have to cook it specially but a few moments later she returned with a slab of plain chicken, which they just happened to have prepared. Unfortunately it was soaked in gravy. I didn't have the heart to send it back.

RAS

Apple sauce

 Tonight we began cooking pasta and then I realised there were no fresh green vegetables, cabbage, leek or celery, to make my sauce.

So I chopped up a golden delicious apple and stir fried it. I then added a tin of tuna. The tuna was in sunflower oil, which was unfortunate, so I had to drain the oil off so far as possible. My first tasting seemed a little disappointing so I added a little soy sauce and then some more rape seed oil. Nothing else.

It was delicious - by far the best tuna sauce I have made.

RAS

News on the omega syndrome

 Well the salt mouth-wash worked, even though I forgot to take further doses. My gums cleared up and there has been no more pain.

This bit of news popped up tonight. The scientists involved seem to be arguing that western diet has switched to an unhealthy balance of omega 6 and omega 3 oils in the last century. So we may not be alone in needing to increase omega 3 consumption. There's not necessarily much new here - it's been known for a while that fish oil improves heart health.

It all serves to reinforce what I discovered originally about the omega syndrome. It's just odd that not many people seem to know about it.


RAS

Wisdom teeth and more

It's been the wisdom teeth on the right side of my jaw causing all the problems over the last week. And as always I'm not sure whether it's worth spending time and money on a dentist or not.

The saga began, I suspect, at a function I attended last week. Champagne and wine were being served in abundance and I could not resist a sip of both. A couple of days later I noticed a twinge in my lower right jaw. This became an ache, and then an agonising ache waking me up at night - so I took some paracetamol and that seemed to calm it down.

I should be so lucky. Over the weekend the upper back jaw flared up and became tender. That seemed to confirm the problem started as an allergic reaction rather than a decaying wisdom tooth.

Sensitive souls don't read on.

Last night as I was brushing my teeth I thought I felt some meat stuck in the tooth at the back - so I gave it a big scrub. Next thing I knew blood was gushing out of my mouth. You probably shouldn't go to sleep with that amount of blood running around your mouth. But I did and woke up alive and ok today. My guess is that the latest problem was an ulcer; I'd forgotten about mouth ulcers and how big a problem they were before I got this under control.

Today I thought it was fine - but eating a meal I realised my right jaw is still very sensitive. So I finally did what I should have done a week ago and washed my mouth out with warm, salted water. There'll be another course of that treatment today.

So it looks as if it was gum inflammation all along. Perhaps there's been an infection too. Somebody said you might as well have your wisdom teeth out in any case to prevent these kind of problems. I really do not want to as it will be an incredibly expensive procedure.

RAS

Ringworm?

A curious red ring, about an inch across, has appeared on my chest. It looks like ringworm but does not itch like ringworm - which I experienced as a child.

I may have found an answer fairly swiftly - a condition called annular erythrema centrifugum. This site says it can be caused by drugs or food "such as blue cheese or tomatoes." Well it's not tomatoes but it might be stilton cheese. Or it might be montelukast. It doesn't seem anything to worry about although the pictures are a little scary.

RAS

Pineapple juice

 A couple of months ago I was craving ice pineapple juice, thinking it was impossible. But the newly refound list says pineapple juice is low in salicylates - so it ought to be okay. And in fact it is the only fruit juice that is okay.

Over the weekend I was shopping and saw a bottle of pressed pineapple juice. That should be fine, I thought.  I reasoned that since pineapple is not on the list, cheap juice made from pulped fruit will be no good but pressed might be okay.

Yesterday I tried it - the first fruit juice I have drunk in two years. There were two problems.

The first was I did not enjoy it. Maybe it would have been better with ice. Maybe pineapple juice really needs to be mixed - perhaps I could mix it with vodka. It was not refreshing.

The second problem was that it was not problem free, not at all. Today the rash is back on my elbows. It had gone away over the weekend. I've taken a montelukast.

RAS

The lost list

It may be obvious - I've been flying by wire for a while. A few days ago I looked on the kitchen pinboard for the dietician's list, only to find it had gone. The reason I wanted it was to remind myself which curry powders are low salicylate. Frankly, my taste buds are dying from neglect. Tuna meals are the pits and as I mentioned before I even find myself going off banana. It's time I attempted home-made curry.

Lo and behold I was rummaging in the garage just a couple of days ago and I found a box of stuff cleared out from the kitchen during some decorating. In there was a list. I'm not sure if it was the dietician's last list as she produced several copies but it was certainly quite a detailed one.

I wish now I'd kept all her lists safely - for there were quite a lot of differences as she put quite a bit of research into the issue. In her original list items such as Golden Delicious apple were safe. In the later list she created two columns "negligible" and "low" and Golden Delicious moved to the low column. I had in my mind a sort of "hardly any" column which represented the foods that started off in the zero column and then moved to low. For also in the low column are foods such as onion and tomato - which I find lethal. Then there is beetroot, which I have been avoiding unnecessarily.

Maybe I will post more observations about the "low" column in the near future.

Then there are parsnip, lettuce and sweetcorn, which somehow crept into my diet and are in fact classed as "moderate". No wonder I've been struggling.

The two curry powders are saffron and tandori and are classed as "low" in this list. I will try to get some.

RAS