What Can MSG Do for You?

 This was a response to the Food Judgment post at the Fat Heffalump site.

The one bone I have to pick (oops!) is with foods from places such as KFC and McDonald's and also with snack foods such as Doritos. It isn't because anyone's bad for eating it, but because it contains a substance that is extremely unhealthy for everybody and downright dangerous for some: Monosodium Glutamate or MSG. This is literally a neurotoxin. It has no flavor of its own. It affects the neurotransmitters in the brain so that the flavors of other foods are enhanced. In many people it causes gastric distress and in some it causes respiratory distress, including in the worst cases, anaphylaxis.
I was able to stop taking all asthma medications when I started looking for MSG in foods.
I don't mention this as an "ew, this makes people fat" remark (I'm fat myself) but rather as something that might help someone (like me) who has been struggling with gastric and respiratory problems and being put on one medication after another to no avail.

The Hell of Panic Attacks

An online friend's daughter is going through severe panic attacks and could use some kind support.

I wrote this and am sharing it here in case it might be of use to someone who is going through this kind of ordeal. There is no hell quite like the hell of panic attacks. Those of you who have never had one can consider yourself fortunate.

I'm sorry your daughter's going through this. At the time that I was sexually assaulted, I was also bipolar but didn't know it. I went through a similar thing.The attack triggered constant, ongoing panic.  I would have panic attacks on and off for about 5 hours a day. I have paradoxical reactions to most medications. Most anti-anxiety meds actually backfire on me in a serious way.  I took tons of the anti-anxiety herb Kava Kava, which actually isn't recommended because of its potential to impact the liver at high doses.  5 HTP might help and it is readily avialiable, but its actions are more subtle.  For me this debilitating cycle of panic went on for about  a year. Then the times between panic attacks became longer and longer.

In 2002, when my paternal grandmother died, I began experiencing panic attacks again. Again the doctors tried medications but they only made things worse. The only thing that helped was biofeedback.  I learned to breathe differently and a variety of techniques to refocus my mind. The only time that this hasn't helped was when I started having panic attacks due to the fact that my doctor raised my dose of Levothyroxine from .25 mg to .75 mg, and blamed the resulting high blood pressure on the fact that I'm a large person instead of looking at my medications. It turns out that I can't tolerate thyroid medication either. It created an artificial state of hyperthyroidism and took three months to entirely clear my system.

I don't know if anything I've told you here might be useful. I hope it might. Outside of asthma attacks, panic attacks are, in my opinion, the absolute worst thing to go through.

Meds are NOT One Size Fits All

In a discussion on a post at The Dreamin' Demon, we bantered about medications and why people quit taking them.

Nobigwhoopdawg says:

Not to mention that the body eventually builds a tolerance to the medications, and they have to be adjusted frequently. And even if by chance you do start feeling weird/crazy, getting in to see a shrink for an adjustment can be a hassle. I know where I live, there's one mental health center, and the last time I was in crisis mode, the wait was nine months to see a prescribing doctor, and a month and a half just to get a talk therapist. I ended up going to my regular doctor to get something to take the edge off.

Er, excuse my oversharing. I'll get a towel and clean that up.
Here is my response:

I have type II bipolar disorder. Normally I'm nowhere close to psychotic, but guess what--antidepressants make me psychotic. Not dangerously so, but I scared the bejeezus out of my son when he was thirteen and the doctor had put me on Effexor and I jumped up on the counter and started preaching. I had been misdiagnosed as having depression/anxiety until I was 38 years old because type II is sneaky--we don't get full manias. I tend to go into severe depressions so people tell me I need an antidepressant, but, no thanks. You hear my account of what Effexor did. Zoloft was like an acid trip. I literally "felt" my brain trying to claw its way out of my head. All I'm able to take is Lithium, which takes the edge off the irritability and paranoia that tends to happen during hypomanias and mixed episodes.

There used to be a wonderful fellow who lived in my town whose mission was to keep the town clean. You could see him at all hours picking up trash around the town. He was paranoid schizophrenic, but he so hated the side effects of his meds that he simply learned to live with his symptoms. Unfortunately, he was hit by a car (driven by a woman with Alzheimer's, of all things, whose meds had made her drowsy) and died. This was a couple of years back. He is missed.

A Case of MRSA

More than two years ago now, one of the residents where I work ended up rubbing the knuckle on one of her toes raw after doing a great deal of walking. This woman was 98 years old at the time and has arthritis. The knuckles on her toes bulge upwards. At first this was just a minor irritation, but it did not heal. When we would help her with her showers we would apply Neosporin to the wound. The doctors also prescribed her a variety of antibiotics.

A few months ago, the wound was diagnosed as having a MRSA (Methycillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) infection. It still has not healed but she now has a wound care nurse who dresses it so it will not become more irritated. The MRSA also ended up infecting the tip of another toe, which had been rubbed raw.

I wonder if we accidentally provided the ideal climate for MRSA by our sporadic application of the Neosporin (only on the nights when we assisted the lady with her showers.)

The Real Cheesemeister is Back

Can we all please forget that "other" Cheesemeister that took over my body during the past day?

I kind of feel like I had a nervous breakdown or something because right now I just can't understand my actions. I have been under so much stress with work, my microbiology class, my parents, helping my son go to his certification class an hour and a half away every day for 2 weeks (he doesn't drive) and trying to complete a short story for a compilation book to benefit breast cancer, plus PMS, I think I just snapped and got a bad case of the paranoids. 

 

I used to go off like this a LOT before I got on Lithium. And I think it's more the borderline personality disorder than the bipolar to blame in this case. Borderline personality disorder is (in my opinion) the result of learned behavior during a dysfunctional childhood. One feels unheard and neglected and only extreme behavior tends to get a "rise" out of one's family. Although studies indicate that the oxytocin levels in people with borderline personality disorder are abnormal. People with this disorder have trouble bonding in healthy ways. At our worse we engage in histrionics (like I did over the past day) and drive others away.

I will be forever grateful who anyone who can forgive me for this insane behavior. And yes, I feel like it is a form of temporary insanity.

I'm glad to be back to abnormal.

The (sheepish) Cheese

Dear Friends

If I still have any.

I sent some of you a rather desperate email yesterday. I now feel desperately ashamed for doing so. I want you all to know that I am NOT suicidal. I have NOT been doing any acts of self-injury. I am depressed right now, but there is a shit ton of stuff going on in my life, plus (sorry dudes) Aunt Flo is about to arrive and that always turns me into a raging bitch or a clingy cry baby. 

A change of meds has been suggested. I appreciate the concern but here is the thing about meds. I cannot tolerate the majority of pharmaceutical medications no matter what they are for. I have bad reactions to them. Antidepressants in specific make me psychotic. Depressed is one thing. Psychotic is another. As I am not normally psychotic, it is not a condition I am used to and I assure you, it is not one I enjoy. So please, though we are all trained to think "antidepressant," they don't work for me the way they are supposed to.

Therapy has also been suggested. I would consider this except that I literally cannot afford it. And I've really never had any luck with it.

As to anything else, I was lonely. Only this and nothing more. There is no need to read anything else into it. And I'm fucking sorry I reached out like that. So, let's all forget about it and go on about our lives, shall we?

Sincerely,

The Cheesy One

Cheesy Rant Time: Natural Supplements

This was in response to an article on Cracked, of all things. 

Okay, #6 thru ten had me saying "hell yeah!" Especially the one about spotting a douchebag. I could have saved myself a lot of time and misery in my youth if I'd known that.
#1-5 made me want to slap the author. I came here for Cracked, not for Health Voice or Self or whatever. And now I have to make a non-humorous rant instead of a semi-humorous comment and I hate you.
Some natural supplements DO work. I for one cannot tolerate most prescription medications. I have hypothyroidism (among several other minor and annoying health issues) and when my doctor gave me prescription thyroid replacement, I developed artificially induced hyperthyroidism which caused my blood pressure to spike, my heart to race, and me to have horrific panic attacks that nearly landed me in the ER. My body does not process this shit properly and it just builds up. When I started using a natural supplement to stimulate my thyroid to do what it should have been doing, my thyroid readings normalized within six months without any of those shitty side effects. My doctor is a holistic physician. He prescribes pharmaceutical medication and utilizes herbal medications as well, and he was very pleased with this result. So yeah, some of the natural stuff does work. Do you have a degree in medicine? If you don't, then you oughtn't be making blanket statements like this that may stop people from finding another path to helping themselves feel better. Pharmaceuticals are hard on the liver and kidneys. They should not be prescribed willy-nilly.
I'm not usually this much of a grouch. But that one really irritated me.