ADHD and Celiac Jealousy

WARNING: This is an incredibly long post and those of you with ADHD may not be able to read it all. I totally understand, being ADHD myself. This being said, I’ve had a major epiphany this past week, one that has exposed a pride in me I didn’t know I had, and I need to write this all down for me to remember. Whether anyone else reads it or not, I really don’t care. I need to put this down for me to read later. Pam Young says discipline is remembering what you really want. I need this post to help me remember.

Part One: ADHD

Many years ago when I was graduating college 9 years after starting it, my mom told me that she wasn’t surprised. She said that when my younger sister and later brother were diagnosed with ADHD, she looked back on my childhood and figured I had it too, but just not as bad. I thought, ok, I probably have ADD.

Fast forward to 14 years ago when I was 42, juggling a full-time job, 3 kids, a husband in grad school and a mother-in-law who was slowly killing herself with diabetes. I was crashing and burning. I had tried day planners to help with my disorganization and ability to forget important things. I spent hours lying in bed in the dark after shopping because it totally overwhelmed me and I couldn’t stand being touched or talked to afterwards. And I had been passed over for promotions at work more times that I’ll ever care to admit.

I finally read a book called Driven to Distraction by two ADHD doctors. What hit me was the list of things that could look like ADHD – in other words, get yourself diagnosed before thinking you have ADHD. I took the 100 question test in the back of the book – just yes/no questions. If you had 30 or more yeses, they suggested you go get tested. I had 88. I decided that if it was ADHD, I needed help. And if it wasn’t ADHD, I needed to find out what it was and get help.

Long story short, I went, got diagnosed with ADHD, found that Adderall worked for me after a disastrous trial of Ritalin (which worked very well for my younger sister) and got all kinds of counseling over the years to help me manage my ADHD. I also learned that with ADHD comes a lot of other emotional disorders (comorbidity – one of my favorite words), but that I am rare that I don’t have anxiety/depression/OCD or something else along with my ADHD. I’m just ADHD.

This paragraph is a key point: whenever I’ve talked about having ADHD with others, I normally get two types of negative reactions: From people without ADHD: “Oh, everyone feels that way [or I have the same symptoms] and they [I] don’t need meds. You just need to eat better, get more sleep, take these supplements, grow up”.  Or they say that ADHD is just a fad diagnosis and that there’s no such thing. From people with ADHD “Oh, please. You only need 10mg of Adderall. That’s candy.” Sometimes I meet people with ADHD who give me positive feedback and encouragement (those are the ones I keep as friends!)

When people tell me they think they might have ADHD, I always tell them to go get tested because it might not be ADHD, it might be depression, anxiety, food allergies, any number of other things listed in that book.

Part Two: Eating and Diet

Over the years, I’ve tried various ways of eating to be more healthy. My favorite was Eat Right 4 Your Type (I’m B+ blood type). I gave up wheat, corn, chicken, tomatoes, oh – a whole lot of things. I’ve never felt better than when I ate that way, but it got too hard to keep it up with a family that had two blood types and with ADHD on top of that, I just gave up.

However, my health got worse and finally, three plus years ago, I decided that I needed to eat better. I had heard about celiac disease and it sounded like what I had. I’ve known for a long time that wheat gives me problems. I thought, as I had when getting diagnosed for ADHD, that if it was celiac, I needed to get help, and if it wasn’t, I needed to find out what it was and get help. I asked to be tested for celiac. The blood test came back negative. So, I decided to do an elimination test myself to see what it was. I went vegan for 6 weeks until I felt better and had no symptoms. Then I added in foods one at a time to see what happened. Sure enough, whenever I ate anything with gluten in it (even if I didn’t know there was gluten in it), I got all the negative symptoms back. So, I started telling people at work that I was gluten-free, but not celiac. Here again, when people tell me they think they might have celiac, I tell them to go get tested, or try the diet for a few months to see if it helps. If it does, great. If not, then go find out what it is that is really hurting them.

About two years ago, I was introduced to low-carb eating, which has helped me in more ways and I lost a lot of weight as well.

And as with discussing ADHD with people, I get similar negative reactions from people because celiac/gluten free eating is now the latest fad, just like ADHD was a few decades ago.

Here’s the thing: up until last week, I’ve been rather annoyed with people who don’t follow the eating regime that they know is better for them – even when I don’t always follow my own. I watched my mother-in-law die at age 69 because she couldn’t/wouldn’t manage her diabetes. But, I do the same thing sometimes. With my ADHD, I don’t always need my meds, so I don’t always take them. I stopped eating low-carb consistently about a year ago, and I’ve gained back most of the weight and have all the other symptoms associated with carb-eating. I’ve tried to go back on it, but it’s hard because carbohydrates are so addicting to me. When I stay away from gluten and carbs, after about two weeks, all the cravings go away and it’s easier. But it’s hard for me to maintain the routine. ADHD helps that problem, but it’s not the whole reason.

Part Three: Epiphany

I now understand more fully how my daughter felt a year ago when she was tested for ADHD and discovered that, though she has some of the symptoms, they weren’t enough to call it ADHD. She does have anxiety, but it felt like a consolation prize diagnosis. (she’s doing fine on her meds now, so she’s feeling better about the whole thing.)

But something happened to me last week that made me realize something.

I am ashamed to admit it but I am going to anyway: I am jealous of those who have celiac.

Because I don’t – at least according to the blood test I took 3 1/2 years ago. But I am gluten intolerant. And I certainly don’t have any of the instant serious symptoms that my celiac friends have. As I have said many times, my celiac friends/family will get sick if you touch wheat and then touch their food. I can lick food off bread and not get sick. It’s just when I eat it that I get the problems.

What happened last week is this: my brother posted on Facebook that he was just diagnosed with celiac.  What got me was when he said that he was stunned because food never has made him sick. He’s never had any symptoms that his celiac wife or other gluten intolerant friends/family have had. He just feels tired, run-down and “old”. His vitamin counts are so low, bad cholesterol high, etc., that he’s surprised he hasn’t dropped dead.

The thing is that he posted that the day after I succumbed to my inner child and had a tiny piece of British crumpet with Irish butter at work. I had been handing it out for several days at demo and just couldn’t resist it any more. The sad thing is that I had been low carb for three weeks and had finally gotten over the carb craving that goes with eating higher carbs. But I thought I could take just one bite and then quit. (It didn’t help that I ran out of Adderall the week before and haven’t gotten my prescription renewed)

That set me off. For the next week, I ate some kind of gluten (and all kinds of carbs) every day. I just couldn’t help myself. And yes, I got all the symptoms I get when I eat that way. I got the cramps, the intestinal ‘flu’, the emotional garbage (which doesn’t help with the ‘couldn’t help myself’ part of all of this). Mother’s Day I ate some cheesecake that was heavenly. I kept telling myself that the next day, I would go back to eating how I know is best for me.

It took me a week and enduring several massive sugar headaches and being sick (I may have gotten the flu which has been passed around at work, but I will never know because of the gluten), and being an emotional wreak before I got in control again. (two days and counting as of this morning). I’m doing the Master Cleanse to reset my system, with a low carb meal at night if I feel the need to chew something.

What I’ve learned is this:

I’m addicted to stuff that can seriously mess me up: gluten and carbohydrates (see: sugar and starches). 

And I’m tired of having to explain why I’m gluten free to people. Tired of saying “I’m gluten sensitive – the blood test for celiac was negative, but …” instead of saying “I have celiac.” I’m tired of celiac people acting as if I can’t understand what they have to go through because I don’t have what they have. (like the diabetics who come to the store and feel, rightly so, that I can’t truly understand what they’re going through, because even though I’ve discovered that eating low carb is better for me, it’s not the same as having diabetes). I’m tired of feeling like celiac’s poor relations – like my problem isn’t good enough for those with real gluten problems.

I’m tired of my inner child (that adorable part of me that is so fun in so many ways) thinking that because I don’t have celiac that I can “cheat” from time to time and not have serious consequences.

So, yesterday, after feeling sorry for myself without being able to explain why to anyone who asked what I was upset about (because I felt foolish for feeling this way), I looked up the difference between celiac and gluten intolerance.

And this is what I’ve learned:

Celiac is an autoimmune disease where the body reacts to the gluten by attacking the actual lining of your intestines. It doesn’t attack the gluten itself. Gluten sensitivity is when the body attacks the gluten itself by inflammation in the intestines and elsewhere but not the body’s own tissue. And one can develop celiac later in life.

So, even though you get a lot of the same symptoms, it’s different. And one article said that gluten sensitivity/intolerance is at the same point in time as celiac was about 30 years ago. In other words, gluten sensitivity is a real disease but it’s not as understood as celiac right now. Oh, and by the way, celiac can cause brain fog and distractibility.

And both celiac and gluten intolerance are ‘cured’ by a gluten free diet. (duh)

So, just as my daughter can now control her anxiety plus Not-Quite-ADHD  by taking meds for anxiety, I need to change my paradigm about my gluten problem. Unless I want to go get a biopsy of my intestines, I won’t know for sure if I have celiac or not – because although I have way more ‘instant’ symptoms than my brother, my blood tests for vitamins, minerals, and cholesterol have always been good. So I probably don’t have celiac. Yet.

But that doesn’t mean that I can cheat. I can’t cheat any more – not with gluten, not with carbs. I don’t like being sick, and feeling old when I try to go upstairs and my hips and knees rebel. I don’t like not sleeping well. I really, really don’t like the severe sugar headaches. And I really don’t like the emotional crap that is running amok in my head. I’m really a happy person. I don’t have clinical depression. But I have gluten/carb depression right now.

I don’t want to kill myself with food.

So, as Pam Young talks about the day in 1977 when she and her sister decided to be organized, I want to talk about May 20, 2013 when I (finally) decided to be gluten-free and low carb.

There. I said it.

There and back again

I took a road trip with my husband today to and from Maryland. About 4-5 hours one way. It was a nice trip … especially since I took my son’s last cottage sock that needed only a few more rows of the cuff ribbing and a balled up skein of the boysenberry cotton/nylon mix yarn I wrote about a few days ago. The sock was finished within minutes of getting on the NJ Turnpike. I’ll be weaving in the ends and painting latex on the bottoms of those babies soon. (I’m so excited)

Now, on to the story of the cotton yarn. Last night, I looked up knitted afghans that were reversible as I think that all afghans/baby blankets should be reversible. I feel the same way about scarves as far as that goes. I want it to look good no matter how it is wrapped around a baby, or tossed onto the bed, couch, or, in the case of a scarf, around a neck.

I found a few that were nice, mostly geometric shapes made with knit and purl stitches, which are easy to knit. Some diamonds, some squares, some quilt-square-esque afghans. I  spent some time last night copying the patterns to graph paper to take with me.

So, here I am in the car, with my needles and yarn. I started to knit it up. Lovely. Soft. Nice boysenberry color. But … As I started to knit up the one pattern I really, really liked the best, it didn’t look like the picture on the pattern.

 

I decided to knit up some stockinette stitch to see what was going on. And there it was. Instead of nice little ‘VVVVV’s of normal stockinette stitch, I had ‘\|\|\|’ stockinette that I’d not seen since I was knitting up Lion Brand’s MicroSpun yarn into doll clothes many years ago.

Looks like this:

 

Looks like tiny cables a little, doesn’t it?

So, the fancy Moss Stitch stuff won’t show up well.

I ripped it all out and pouted for a little while because, after all, I hadn’t brought any other yarn to play with while my husband drove. I did some driving on the way home, but got tired (Wednesday is my day off and the day I usually take naps to make up for the sleep I miss the rest of the week). After sleeping off and on for a couple of hours, I remembered that one of the patterns I had liked had squares of stockinette and reverse stockinette and that this yarn might look OK with it.

 

So, I knit up a rather large swatch of that pattern:

 

It looks rather nice, though in this picture it looks way more pink than the actual boysenberry red-violet actually looks like in person. That, by the way, is one whole skein of the yarn (80 yards approx.)

Now, there’s only one tiny problem: I have 10 skeins of this yarn. That means, basically, that I have enough for 20 squares in this pattern, plus a little extra for the edges. But the size of baby blanket I want to make needs 24 squares. So, now I have to decide if I just make a smaller blanket, or order more yarn and hope to high heaven that the two dye lots are close enough, or find another color that looks good with boysenberry. Or decide to make a baby blanket out of something else. Or give up on the baby blanket idea and knit something totally different. Or not.

 

P.S. Looking at the original picture, I realized that I didn’t make my squares the same ration of middle to outside as the original designer did, but my problem still stands: I need more yarn to make a baby afghan of about 28″ by 39″. Pooh. Now I have to rip out that swatch and knit it again. *sigh* It was fun swatching though!

My New Toy

New “Wool Winder” and my very first-ever hand-wound ball

Or, as I found in another post somewhere online, my very first-ever hand-wound ‘cake’ of yarn! Umm-umm good!

I now understand why everyone gets a swift at the same time as a ball winder. It was so FUN to wind the skein from this:

Paton Decor Yarn

to that lovely flat-bottomed center-pull ball of yarn. However, it was tricky because I have no swift to put the yarn on to turn effortlessly as I wound it on my new toy. I ended up putting it on a broom handle and then taking turns unwinding some of the yarn, then winding it up on the ball-winder, then unwinding it some more. Towards the end, it was able to spin freely on the broom as I turned the handle of the winder.

I wonder how one really goes from a skein like this easily. Most of the swifts I’ve seen online are for hanks only. I’ll have to do a little more investigation.

On the knitting front, I’m SO CLOSE to finishing my son’s last cottage sock. I’m at the cuff at the top so by the end of today or tomorrow, I will be weaving in the ends! All that will be left after that is to add the non-stick stuff to the bottoms of his and my dil’s cottage socks and they’ll be mailed. How nice to get the Christmas knitting done before June (from last Christmas!) Then I’ll have to get started on this coming Christmas’ knitting!

Missing In Action

Last night, as we were getting ready to go to bed, my daughter mentioned that I hadn’t blogged for a while. A long while. I checked this morning … sure enough, it’s been a month.

It doesn’t seem like a month. I’ve been very busy with various stuff, but knitting has always been on my mind. Actually, accumulating stash has been on my mind … and wallet.

I finally succumbed to the plethora of emails from the various yarn and knitting supply companies that I’ve bought stuff from over the years. (how can I resist a 50% off coupon?!) Not to mention the emails from the craftsy classes I’ve signed up for over the past year that I’ve not finished yet.

So, this past month, I’ve added 10 skeins of boysenberry colored cotton/nylon yarn (TEN??!!??? I’ve never bought that much of the same yarn since I made my husband his one-and-only sweater back in my first year of marriage <cough> 1987 <cough>). Not sure what I’m going to make, but it sounded so wonderfully soft (it is) and a great yarn for summer knitwear (I’m sure it will be).

Then, the instructor of the “knitting with beads” class I’m taking on craftsy announced that she was the leader of the craftsy June 2013 mystery knit-along (KAL for short). I’ve never done a KAL. Ever. Especially a mystery one. But that sounded intriguing, and not too much cost, so … Now there’s a mystery skein of yarn, mystery color, coming my way from mystery location and then all I have to do is wait for June 1st for the mystery pattern to be activated on my craftsy account. (I love mysteries!)

Then there’s the coupon I got from another online store and I finally ordered a ball-winder since most of the yarn I’ve been getting has been in hanks and I really don’t want to be hand-winding that stuff. But now I need a swift to go with it … <grin>

I’ve also been watching (and finally finished yesterday) my craftsy class on how to write knit patterns. Boy, oh boy! Did I learn a lot. My patterns will be so much better written (unlike that sentence!). I really enjoyed it.

And I finally figured out what to do for my co-worker/best friend/identical sister-from-a-different-mother ‘s birthday this coming Sunday. But I can’t tell you because it’s a surprise and she reads my blog. But it’s TOTALLY COOL!! (I’m so excited)

Now I have to stop my ADHD from getting into my wallet and spending all my discretionary money on knitting stuff and get back to actually knitting something other than the grocery bags and dishcloths I’ve been obsessed with lately. (OH – bought a cone of Sugar ‘N Cream for half price with a Jo Ann’s half price coupon so now I’ve got TONS of “key lime pie” cotton stuff to play with. Can’t have too many dishcloths!)

My son’s last cottage sock is coming along nicely and should be finished as soon as I take it with me instead of the cotton stuff. Maybe I should tell my inner child that she can’t knit on anything else until that is finished. Hmmm. That’d do it.

Time to go knit something!

Come Listen to a Prophet’s Voice and Knit!

So wonderful. listening to the general authorities of my church this past weekend. The best part is that, with the internet, I can watch them on my computer from the comfort of my own living room and knit at the same time.

As a child, I listened to Conference on the radio or, when my family lived in Idaho, watched it on TV. I remember lying on the floor, coloring massive amounts of pages in various coloring books while we listened. Even then, not knowing I had ADHD, I listened better while my hands did something.

When I went to Brigham Young University, it was even easier as the conference was broadcast through the loud speakers at the school cafeterias. I couldn’t understand why more students didn’t go to lunch a half hour before conference let out and just listen to the rest of it while eating. It sure beat standing in the long lines that appeared 10 minutes after the closing prayer.

After that, as a young adult/mother, I took my kids, along with the coloring books of their childhood, to our chapels and letting them lie out on the floor of the foyer, coloring while listening. Sometimes I knitted. sometimes I did counted cross-stitch. Sometimes I colored too (old habits are hard to break!).

But now, my children and I can sit on our own furniture, lie on our own floor, play computer games silently, or knit for all 4 sessions. Unfortunately, I had work/family obligations on Saturday, so I only got to watch Sunday’s meetings. But it was still wonderful. I love President Monson – especially after hearing how he cleared a field of weeds one year as a boy.

And I finished my daughter-in-law’s second cottage sock! Yep. Ok, I knit in-between sessions too, and afterwards until … ahem … late. But both are done!! Now I can start my son’s other cottage sock and soon, very soon, I will be posting pictures of happy son and wife wearing their seriously warm cottage sock slippers – just in time for summer! (*sigh*)

Work/Play/Work/Play

Look at all the recycling I put out this morning!

OK, maybe not everything on both sides of the driveway are mine, but most of the boxes filled with paper and other cardboard are mine.

Yesterday, I had a whole day where I didn’t have to go to work, and I didn’t have any appointments or scheduled activities until I drove my daughter to her job at 5 pm. I had seriously thought of playing hooky and running off to a bookstore or movie theater to veg out for the entire day (I’ve been feeling the need for a vacation recently).

But then I decided that running away, while very nice and I do plan to do that in the near future, wouldn’t get me where I needed to be and, more importantly, wanted to be. That and my new GymBoss interval timer had arrived in the mail the day before and I was dying to try it out.

So, I did what I call “Work/Play/Work/Play”. I set the GymBoss’s two timers to 30 minutes and 15 minutes and set off. The girls and I did 30 minutes of work (I did housework and they did school work) and then we had 15 minutes of play time. The GymBoss repeats the intervals automatically if you set it that way so every 30 or 15 minutes, an alarm would sound and we’d switch gears.

The result? Well, the girls got a lot of tests ready to send off to their homeschooling company and I cleaned out my office that had been pretending to be a closet for the winter. I also put up a new towel rack in my bathroom, split out my son’s heavy box of old papers into smaller boxes for recycling today (see picture above), and moved the bird feeder pole to where I can see birds eating from where I sit in my kitchen in the mornings.

I also tried to finish the taxes on Turbo Tax, but that didn’t get quite finished. (pooh).

During my play times, I knit the heel on my dil’s second cottage sock, reorganized my entire stash and added labels to the boxes so I know where everything is, and treated my daughters to a Chipotle lunch. Then, in the evening, I got to watch “White Collar” with my husband while my girls watched “Finding Nemo” in honor of the announcement that “Finding Dory” is going to start filming soon. I joined the girls for the end of the movie after I finished watching with my husband.

I’m very pleased with the amount of work I got done and recommend the W/P/W/P time management idea to all who have a hard time starting work or sticking to it for a long time (those of us with ADHD will understand that I’m talking to us). If 30 minutes is too long, then set the timer for 10 or 15 minutes and then 10-5 minutes for play. You’ll be amazed at the work you can get done … and the playing you can get done too!

 

Finished Projects

I’ve been busy knitting away on my dil’s cottage socks plus my “mindless” knitting cotton projects. I thought I’d show off as I finished the first sock and several dishcloths and a grocery bag!

one down, one to go!

(I may never again knit anything with this many cables, but I LOVE how it looks!)

One mini grocery bag, one regular sized dishcloth and one monster dishcloth

I admit the brown and white dishcloth – really the size of my cleaning cloths – was just an excuse to finish using the brown that I had made two of my mop-heads with. I wanted to see how much was left … and then I paired it with leftover cream yarn. When I finished it, it reminded me of black-and-whites that they sell out here – a cake-like cookie that is frosted half with chocolate and half with vanilla frosting. Yum!

I also wrote up the grocery bag as a PDF file and put it on my pattern page along with the grocery bag pattern, so you can now download either one to use however you wish.

Now I”m off to start the second cottage sock for my dil. My goal is to finish with hers and my son’s cottage socks before my birthday in the beginning of June. The reason that the goal is so far out is that I’ve had the opportunity to be mentored by someone in the field that I want to get back into, so most of my free time for the next few months (or longer) will be taken up with that. But I’ll still be knitting. Oh yes. Still knitting.