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.

thank you, i love you all, and i will beat you with my cane

i cannot thank you all enough for your prayers, thoughts, love, and support.  anaphylactic reactions and severe asthma are unfortunately a daily reality for my family.  it's beyond terrifying, so your prayers and words of comfort mean so much to me.  the one good thing that can come out of my mom's health situation are medical journal articles and studies bringing about awareness.  her case is such a rarity (only one other person in the u.s. has food allergies as severe as hers), making sure it is documented and studied is important.  my mom and i were released from the hospital late last night with lots of breathing machines and steroids, and now she's home and doing well.  my dad also came home from europe last night, so he was able to stay home from work today and be with her.  that means i'm back in the office.  ugh.

i seriously have so much blogging material from our hospital slumber party that i'll have to share with you later.  (i've got a crapton of work to catch up on.  i was working from the hospital on my phone and laptop as much as i could.)  just to give you a little preview of stories to come: 85 year old woman with a walker begins wielding it as a weapon on the male nurses.  i promise you, it's funny stuff.

and just to share a little family tidbit with you all: as of this past sunday, my little brother is officially legal and he's all grown up! it's still so weird to me that in a few short months he'll be leaving for college. my family and i live in the same city and are extremely close; his leaving will especially affect our 11 year old sister who calls her big brother her "best friend." here's one of the pics (we are doing some serious squinting in the sun) we took at the sunday lunch celebration after church (sans pops who was still in europe thanks to the volcano spewing ash all over the place):

my momma with her three babies

hospital slumber parties

hey friends, i'm blogging on my iPad from my mom's hospital room. she was admitted yesterday after having an anaphylactic allergic reaction. looks like we'll be having a couple more slumber parties here because the swelling in her throat and tongue isn't going down as quickly as the doctors would like. my dad is still in europe, so i'm staying here at the hospital with my mom and making sure my siblings are taken care of. please keep my mom and i in your prayers. i would love and totally appreciate lots of prayers! the steroids are keeping my mom wired, so i have yet to sleep! we've stayed up watching movies and playing games on the iPad. so i guess it was money well spent!

getting all webMD in your face: food allergies

now that you all know what the title of my blog really means, a few of you have asked me some other questions.

a lot of you know that i have a few food allergies, desiree from at clemson girl and bathwater asked me what exactly my food allergies were and bathwater specifically wanted to know how i survived on marshmallows alone. 

good question since i've never really gone into any detail about it.  the answer is: i starve myself.  well, not really, but that's what i tell people when they ask me at a luncheon why i'm not eating.  actually, when i'm at a luncheon and i can't eat any of the food, women always ask me: oh my gosh, meredith!  why aren't you eating??  you're going to wither away to nothing.  you're already skinny.  i typically give them a dirty look and say: i'm not skinny, you're just overweight, so you think i'm skinny.  oh, and i'm anorexic.  'rexies don't eat, ya know.  it's irritating, to say the least.  though maybe if i had kate moss' willpower to not eat, i would go that route.  unfortunately, i don't.  i love food and i love to eat.  clearly.

anybitch, food allergies are a lot more complicated than a lot of people realize.  for example, just because i can eat something from one restaurant doesn't mean i can eat that same dish from another restaurant because each place uses different ingredients and has different preparation methods.  for instance, i can't eat apples during certain months out of the year when ragweed and mold spore counts are high.  for a couple months out of the year, eating certain fruits and vegetables when environmental allergens are high causes my mouth to break out in blisters.

so in a nutshell (no pun intended) here's what i'm allergic to.  and you should know, my food allergies weren't always like this, they've just gotten worse as i've gotten older for some reason.  apparently people can both grow out of and into food allergies, unfortunately.  so some of these are fairly new (like within the past two years), so it's taking some getting used to. 

milk
(yes, this also means ice cream, certain cheeses, yogurt, and anything creamy delicious)

soy

nuts  

(primarily almonds.  i think i may be able to eat some other kinds, but i just avoid all nuts just to be safe.)

shellfish 

(i.e. oysters, shrimp, crab, lobster, etc. - anything with a shell on it and lives in the ocean.  duh.)

certain kinds of fish

beef

avocados

mushrooms

SULFITES  

(the biggest, baddest bitch of them all)

the sulfite allergy is the most serious of them all because it is a preservative found in A LOT of different kinds of food.  here's just some of the foods that contain sulfites: wine, bottle lemon and lime juices, molasses, dried fruit, grape juice, frozen potatoes, fresh mushrooms, guacamole dip, salad dressing, vinegar, fruit topping, gravy, sauces, pickles, maple syrup, imported sausages, certain deli meats, prepackaged muffin mixes, cider, soft drinks, beer, pre-made pie crust and pizza dough, crackers, boxed cookies... the list goes on... so you kind of get the idea how it's somewhat difficult to to "grab a meal on the go." 

the reactions i have from accidentally eating foods i shouldn't have eaten can be very, very mild and not life threatening like itchiness or tingling.  The more moderate reactions include hives, stomach cramping, vomiting, and a drop in blood pressure.  The most serious reactions are include swelling of tongue, lips, and airways to straight up anaphylaxis (i.e. you can't breathe).  obviously the most life threatening reaction is an anaphylatic reaction in which your airways close completely and you are unable to breathe.  this isn't a good feeling.  it's scary and hopeless and you feel like "oh, shit, i'm going to die."  because if you can't breathe, you die.  unless you are a superhero and can breathe through your skin.  i'm not a superhero, just a superbitch so breathing through the skin doesn't work for me.  this mean that an epi-pen is my best friend.  "epi" gets to go EVERYWHERE i go.  and if i have a reaction i get stabbed by epi.

my mom is actually a medical freak when it comes to allergies. like she's been stabbed with the epi lots of times.  i am NOTHING compared to her.  she has eight different kinds of food she is able to eat without having a severe anaphylactic reaction.  part of the reason why i'm so crazy is because i am constantly worrying about her.  she is actually being studied by a lot of doctors around the u.s. and receives testing from a research hospital in denver, colorado called national jewish hospital.  my little sister also attends that research hospital for her medical issues.  unfortunately, there is no "cure" for severe food allergies, there is only awareness.  having asthma on top of food allergies typically doesn't help much either.  the food allergy and anaphylaxis network actually has a fundraiser walk each year.  you can check it out here and see when it'll be coming to your city. 

well, now that i've given you a lesson you could have received from webMD, i'll be back to talking about THE ga tomorrow.  or maybe i'll answer one of your more tantalizing questions... we'll see how i'm feeling.  if you hated this very boring, but educational post - sorrs.  if we're going to be BFF, you better know what you're getting yourself into.  (i'm talking to you, trifecta - jess and money.) 

oh, and i guess i should answer the question: what do i eat??  i eat banana bread for breakfast every single morning, pretty much.  since a lot of breads have milk and/or soy in them, i have become the betty crocker of bread baking.  seriously.  i'm kind of awesome at baking.  99% of everything i eat is organic.  i eat lots of chicken, pork, egg whites, brown rice, beans, sweet potato fries, and veggies.  i have this great pizza place i love in houston that i go to every now and then.  i just have to eat the pizza without the cheese!  for sweets, i eat rice dream (kind of like ice cream, but not) and lots of vanilla sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies.  for snacks i eat organic blue corn chips, rice cakes, baby carrots, back to nature cookies and honey graham sticks.  i can pretty much eat anything a "normal" person eats, just sometimes it has to be highly modified!  i follow a lot of recipes in a monthly magazine i receive called living without.

and don't forget to enter my first ever giveaway!!  giveaway ends this wednesday, and a winner will be announced thursday morning!!