elainegrey

From the Asian grocery downtown: ( Math! It's not just an American problem )

Last night after we'd drifted off to sleep we got a call from a neighbor about Edward. We'd invited her to make the call, as Edward heads to her place in the evening if he doesn't come in for dinner here.

The start of waking to the phone ring brought back to mind the years i was on-call. How did i manage?

For those of you who weren't reading then, a brief review. In '04 the i was working under significant pressure to migrate to a commodity database and cheaper Sun hardware from the IBM mainframe. The demands on the database were huge: we'd spent lots of time with the vendor discussing partitioning strategies and performance optimizations. The usual tricks did not apply; the requirements for updates, indexing, and recall were fairly significant. It was very stressful.

In early '05, we had major lay offs, and i was moved from software and system development to managing operations. My four system administrators were barely enough to cover the response to outages, much less design better systems for redundancy and improved uptime. I was on-call continuously to support them. The most stressful period of being on-call lasted through the end of 06. I'd say easily a year and a half of frequently interrupted sleep. A new parent may laugh at that. But there was something about the drain that comes from responding to crisis -- crashed hardware, database failures -- that was really wearing on me then. It wasn't routine: it was troubleshooting at 3 am.

I was reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysthymia yesterday, thanks to DABroots' musing, and recognized the sentence, "Some sufferers describe being under chronic stress. When treating diagnosed individuals, it is often difficult to tell whether they are under unusually high environmental stress or if the dysthymia causes them to be more psychologically stressed in a standard environment." There's also the note that, "At least three-quarters of patients with dysthymia also have a chronic physical illness." In a cognitive model that depends on analysis of cause and effect, the interrelationships here cause a great deal of frustration. The pronouncement i get from my mother and medical folks about some of my complaints is that, "It's due to stress." That's not exactly helpful particularly as i've addressed that with a variety of tools. Today, i look back and believe that the period of being on call was significantly stressful. My life today, not so much. Yet the blues, the physical symptoms, they all remain. I *feel* stressed.

I'm trying to moderate my hope about the elimination diet. Could there be some food chemical(s) that have stressed me since birth (parental anecdotes certainly describe a child very fussy and reactive), that i could remove from my diet and, Voila! be better? The hope is all caught up with a pessimistic expectation that this won't work. My current state of being burnt out feels like it has been with me forever (although i know i wasn't feeling burnt out this spring, that i was marveling at what i was able to do). I'm tired and blue, and tired of being tired and blue.

Letter to the list of nutritionists i'm contacting. "Hi, i'm an assertive, strong-willed patient. Do you really want to have to put up with me?"


I have been diagnosed with a spectrum of chronic concerns including asthma, chronic rhinitis, and psoriasis. I have a spectrum of other complaints that include chronic and large canker sores, some digestive tract irregularity, and frequent ebbs in energy. I address the diagnosed issues with maintenance medications, and have spent a good deal of effort addressing my psychological health. The persistent malaise remains, and i am currently interested in exploring whether a food sensitivity is a cause.

I would like to find a nutritionist who would be my partner in an elimination diet, assisting me with finding a simple initial diet that excludes all potential sensitivities but meets my daily needs, and then who could partner in planning the reintroduction of food classes and monitoring for reactions.

If this is a methodology you are comfortable with, i would appreciate a reply. If not, i would welcome any recommendations of a nutritionist who may be experienced with this method. Could you include your fee scale in your reply, and whether phone consultations are possible? (During the challenge period, i don't know if i can make frequent office visits, but phone visits may be satisfactory.)

Thank you for your attention and assistance,

Edward is chewing on my toes through the sheets. He still has a good instinct for kitteny play. He did disappear yesterday morning, and it turns out he did (does) have another fan in the complex. We've made contact with her, but i still worry about his roaming once the collar is off. All the kitties want to go out. Cone comes off tonight, i leave for the east coast very early on Tuesday.

I've spent much of the morning searching for a nutritionist. I think i will try to put some effort towards intervention. I could do interviews and a food diary in August, actual diet change in September into October. Much later and SAD and flu season could affect results.

As i've read many websites of practitioners associated with National Association of Nutrition Professionals (NANP) today, i find myself feeling depressed and cynical. A friend starts a chat:

R: [friend] says that he's suspicious of any food that he particularly likes or wants
Me: That's one theory -- that the cravings are related to triggered sensitivity reactions.
R: exactly, "if I crave it it must be bad for me."
Me: That goes against the "i can trust my body" lesson i've been learning, so if i do this on my own i'll definitely have a huge cognitive struggle. On the other hand, so many of these nutritionists' websites seem evangelistic with respect to "whole foods cure everything" -- and we *do* eat a good deal of whole foods.

Yesterday's picnics were lovely, despite the surprising midafternoon occurrence of a smattering of raindrops. Incredibly localized, so the date will likely be recorded as having no rain in the area. Friends had good conversation, good bread. Seeing my sister-in-law was a little odd, as she had encountered friends from Beijing. They chatted about their Beijing friends, the exodus back to home countries as companies reduce size in the recession, school gossip, and so on. It was somewhat enlightening just to overhear. I'm reminded of my impression of 19th century British colonialists in India and other countries: both a smallness and narrowness of community. The numbers of people in the community are small and "everybody knows everybody's business," and the community is populated by a fairly homogeneous group of people: similar corporate employers, similar family situations. I wonder how hard it is to connect back to people outside of that milieu. I know how hard it is for me to connect back to my mom and extended family at times just with a life that centers around the virtual plane.