So I’ve been pretty quiet in the past fortnight or so. Hardly tweeted and not sure I’ve updated Facebook for a good while let alone write a blog. Well I am still here and the reason I’ve been relatively quiet is because yet again I have been unwell. After years of a bad cold being the low point in my health, since I decided to aggressively my weight issues I have been felled by numerous illnesses.
Top of the tree was and still is my throat, which whilst much better still isn’t 100% and recently I have been unable to fully open my jaw. This should pass relatively soon but for now watching me attempt to eat is quite a pathetic and humorous experience.
However this post is about lactose intolerance. This is the thing that really knocked the wind out of my sails. I got some very nasty food poisoning a couple of weeks back, I lost six lbs in six hours as the body expelled all of the bad stuff inside of me. It was grimmer than grim but after a day or so I felt much better and felt some sort of appetite come back so thought I would eat something. Now my mom had told me not to eat any dairy for a few days but as a non dairy eater in general I didn’t really think about it.
So I walked into the kitchen and sitting there was a packet of bakewell slices. ‘Cake’ I thought, brilliant. So I ate some and proceeded to sit down and watch the football, but then my stomach started making noises, noises that sounded like it was hungry and wanted more food so I went into the kitchen and looked in the freezer. I didn’t have a lot in there and I had nothing in the fridge as I hadn’t been food shopping yet. I thought pizzas were a no go so I delved further a saw mini kievs, simple enough, so I bunged them into the oven and ate them 20 odd minutes later. Now my stomach was all over the place, I had no idea what was going on.
My stomach was making gas noises like I had trapped wind and suddenly I was running to the loo, there I would sit for the next 6-7 hours as I suffered not knowing what the hell was going on. At that point I had not put two and two together and after several hours of immense stomach cramps, pain and expelling everything that could possibly have been inside of me, I was extremely close to calling for an Ambulance but I refrained and just decided to sit it out. The whole experience was made worse by blood coming from somewhere it shouldn’t be and that is what was really getting my attention.
Come the morning things had calmed down but still toilet tissue was smeared in blood. I didn’t know what to do, so instead of going to a healthcare professional, I went onside and dd some research. I had clearly had an lactose intolerance attack and now all the lactose had been expelled I would recover. Now I would just have to hope this was just an isolated incident and that when my stomach was fully back up to speed, my cake eating would not be curtailed in any way, shape or form by this.
Well over the weekend I decided to try and ate some cookies. My stomach held up and subsequently I have eaten more dairy and it clearly was a short-term issue. Still it was one of the most painful nights of my life and it has taught me a big lesson, after a major stomach upset, lay off the dairy whilst the body recovers and starts producing lactase again. The blood luckily came only from a cut, now whilst having a cut where you really don’t want a cut is painful enough, cuts heal pretty quickly and after a few days the blood stopped.
Still though we are ten days or so out from my initial food poisoning and I still don’t really have much of an appetite, I’m eating because I know I have to eat. I still have very little energy (quite possibly from having no appetite and therefore not eating that much) and keep falling asleep in the afternoon or evening, not just for a small snooze but for several hours at a time. I am slowly feeling better but it has just wiped me out totally.
So the lesson of the story b’s and g’s is that if your mom tells you some health advice then listen to it strictly and more bluntly, if you have food poisoning or a serious stomach upset then for your own sakes, don’t touch anything remotely dairy. Suffering from an attack of lactose intolerance is immensely painful and will wipe you out for a few days to boot.
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