my momma

 my momma and me a few years ago after my last collegiate soccer game

i hope everyone had a great weekend.  my mom is still felling really, really awful and she is having allergic reactions to the oral steroids the doctors have her on so her body is covered in hives and her throat and tongue are still swollen.  she's having trouble eating because her body is so out of whack, she's even reacting to her "safe" foods.  asthma and allergies go hand in hand, so now her asthma is giving her a lot of problems.  houston's air quality doesn't exactly help, so she has been looking to move either near national jewish hospital in denver or johns hopkins.  she is a patient at both hospitals which are stellar in the fields of asthma and allergies.  she's feeling really down and frustrated.

 it's killing me to see her go through this, and i feel completely and utterly helpless.  please, please continue to pray for her.  

while i have pretty severe food allergies, mine are nothing compared to my mom's.  she is essentially allergic to everything she eats, so she eats very small amounts throughout the day and is on a strict regiment of strong antihistamine medications.  living with severe food allergies and having had multiple anaphylactic reactions is terrifying to say the least, yet my mother is still the strongest, most positive, upbeat person i know. 

some people have asked me what exactly she is allergic to, and simply put: everything.  i know it doesn't make sense, but essentially we monitor her diet with the "parts per million" ppm.  as she's gotten older, we've had to decrease her threshold to "parts per trillion" or ppt.  she's primarily allergic to sulfites, which are preservatives found in everything and can also be naturally occurring. she obviously has to eat in order to sustain life, but she has to do so in small amounts, so as not to trigger a reaction - it depends on the quantity of ppms or ppts in the food she's eating.  it's all complicated and i won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, it's trial and error sometimes, unfortunately.

i'm kind of frazzled right now, so the old woman kicking ass story with her cane will have to wait.  thanks for sticking around even while i have nothing to entertain you with.  i'll try to be back later today.

oh, and while we were in the hospital she made me promise to tell my blog bfffffs two things.  she was a liiiiittle out of it on all the drugs and oxygen she was receiving and made me promise: 

(1) i would post a pic of her looking all ET-like:

(2) she is convinced that hospital bed sheets smell like poop and she does NOT appreciate poopie sheets.  she just wanted you all to know.