Saturday, November 13, 2010

Hidden costs of "convenience"

So I've been on this diet for several months... no dairy (that's "no" with three underlines); no uncooked leafy greens; minimal (at most) sugar, at best two large handfuls of fruit a day.

I think that what my healer is trying to do is to lower the number of balls my immune system is trying to keep in the air, to quit throwing things at it that it wants to/has to deal with, so that it will stop fighting All Sorts Of Stuff and clear out the immunological noise, so he can figure out what's making it gnaw away at my myelin (or whatever other part of my nervous system it's gnawing at).

I was doing great until I started this school year. The school has truly wonderful food service; what they create is healthy, nutritious, and really quite good. You'd be surprised at all the vegetables they get the kids to eat.

Unfortunately for me, one of their tricks apparently is... butter.

Now, I had been trying to be good, if what they had on offer was clearly dairy laden, I said no. They'd even make me "naked burritos" with just the meat mixture, no lettuce/cheese. They were very accommodating, and generous.

But, I'm afraid, it seems they use a lot more butter than I thought they did. Which, it seems, has trashed my system.

I'm now on a "herbs every two hours until something improves" regimen. Which means, alas, no tea, since I need to keep tea clear of the herbs (they don't get along well). The upside, happily, is "no side effects" to my medication regimen. None. Never.

But this means that I'm pretty much never going to eat a most Western restaurants ever again, because they're Butter Crazy. Not really much of a loss, since I prefer Japanese to pretty much every other style; Thai and Chinese I like too, and it's very easy to be non-dairy with those. But it means that when my department at work wants to go to a restaurant, I probably can't (they like "normal" food, not the "weird" stuff I like), and when for whatever reason I have to go to a particular restaurant, finding options is going to be ... interesting.

But then again, what about the MS experience doesn't involve creative accommodation around what most people consider "normal"?

Which makes accommodation, for us... "normal."

So, in being different, we are actually... all the same.

We're all "normal."

How different would our world be if everyone realized that? Not that I'd wish MS on the world, but... its side-effects do have their advantages, do they not?

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