What’s that smell? Episode 3

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Present day: I’m sat in bed in M&S pyjamas; typing on my new Bluetooth keyboard (I thought I’d treat myself on the back of reaching 10 whole blog posts!) having just finished a honey, lemon and ginger tea (the theme of pretentious drinks continues – maybe I should set up poshdrinkwanker.co.uk as a hedge against future success) trying desperately to stay awake after the wedding that was beautifully pre-segwayed in the Dairy-Free Stag Do post a few weeks ago. The wedding was great but this morning was slightly dampened by a combination of Piglet waking at 6am (as per), a foray into making rubbish cocktails (Gin and Coke anyone?) and far too enthusiastic dancing for the songs I wasn’t feeling too self-conscious to dance through.

One of the highlights of the wedding was a vegan coconut panna cotta, even if it did coincide with heading off a dairy ice-cream bound directly for my son. Because (and if you haven’t worked this out by now, I’ve got to question why you’re still reading) I am allergic to milk and Piglet is allergic to milk and soya. However, I left the last post (Episode 2) having clarified that I had started eating milk again by the time I went to university and was even aware of the minor effects of doing so. I feel I owe you a bit of an explanation of how I got from there to here.

So we’ll start in my mid-20’s. The year is 2010. I’m living in Bath, Somerset with my (now) wife, a year before we end up getting engaged. Piglet is a distant notion; a happy concept of proper adulting, something I feel I’m still comfortably years away from attempting. I am enjoying going into restaurants and actually being able to just order stuff. I’ve kind of learnt the steps to the dance that is paying someone to make, serve and eventually clear away your food. I’m still aware that eating too much milk can make me feel a bit funny. I would often get drowsy shortly after eating buttery goods (oh I did love a flapjack) but I wasn’t aware that I was having any allergic reactions.

I’ll be clear at this point that I don’t claim to fully understand my allergies. I am not going to scientifically document my reactions or categorically rule in or out what symptoms are definitely related to my consumption of food. I’m also dubious that anyone else could do it for me. There are a lot of people with some very strong views (and no doubt some very good research) on what medically happens in the body and why we see more allergies now than we maybe did in years gone by. What I do believe is that we cannot fully separate the mind and the body in how we react to our surroundings and therefore how we think and feel about things is likely to be as big a factor as what we physically do to our bodies. As a result I make no attempt to convey any ‘facts’ of my allergy; I just intend to tell you what I think happens (and to some extent why). Apologies for a humourless paragraph. I’d drop in a joke to lift the tone but my sense of humour is appalling! Maybe just a touch of breaking the 4th wall. In fact, is discussing the 4th wall effectively breaking the 5th wall? Meta.

Skip forward to my 30’s and things have changed a bit. We now live in Windsor. We have a little Piglet. I have forgotten what it feels like to be rested and now alternate between unadulterated adoring love for my new family in all their innocent wonder of the world; and behaving like a deranged schizophrenic, shouting at the sleep deprived voices in my head and endlessly obsessing about not dropping Piglet down the stairs! (Apparently this is not uncommon, some sort of unintended consequence of the paternal protective hormones that flood around your body as the parent of a new-born). Time is now much more precious. I say that, I should clarify this statement a bit: some of my time is more precious – those rare moments of quiet solitude, the happy smiles and giggles of recognition, the peaceful moments where he’s asleep and we can eat… Those moments are precious. The hours bouncing him around a dark bedroom while stubbing your toes on the corner of the bed, or lying like a contortionist over the edge of his cot with your lifeless pins-and-needles-throbbing fingers trapped under his body until you are sure you can move away without waking him up; those moments: less so. But in this new world of precious time I find I have less sympathy for being so tired I can’t do anything after dinner or having stomach cramps at night or just generally feeling rubbish at all. And so I started looking for solutions.

A croissant. I remember the exact moment I realised I might still have a problem with milk. The in-laws had come to stay with us for the weekend and we had treated ourselves to a lazy Sunday morning breakfast. Piglet was still much too small to be eating actual food but we’d put on coffee, tea, melon, croissants, orange juice etc… as a treat of a breakfast for the rest of us. About an hour after finishing breakfast I started to feel a bit strange. I’m overwhelmed by fatigue (and its saying something if you can tell that you’re more overwhelmed by fatigue than normal as the parent of a small baby). I feel grumpy, irritable even. I’m also very warm – almost like a hot flush – and so drowsy I seem a bit drunk. Eventually I have to go and lie down. It’s not until later, when discussing it with my wife, that I notice that it coincided with the butter in the croissants.

I’d actually tried going without milk before this. We’d suspected for a little while that it might have been causing some of my discomfort/drowsiness but I’d never really removed it strictly enough or long enough to know whether it was the cause. However, my reaction to this croissant was so clear that I decided to do a proper elimination test. Two weeks with as close to zero cow’s milk as I could get. I took it seriously and was as strict with myself as I knew how to be. Even then, I failed to really see any benefits. It wasn’t until I stopped the test that I fully appreciated the difference. The first night after I started having milk again I was in real pain. It felt like a had a large stone in my stomach and no way to shift it. I basically stopped eating cow’s milk from that point.

It was difficult going back to being the fussy eater who had to check ingredients again. I hated the loss of liberty of being able to eat where and what I wanted. Suddenly restaurants became ‘good’ or ‘bad’ again; eating out much less easy. I also found it quite difficult to cut certain things out of my diet. I’d become very used to eating chocolate, flapjacks, cakes etc as snacks at work. I found I’d go hungry in the afternoon with nothing sweet available to tide me through from lunch until dinner. (I can just hear the sound of the world’s smallest violin being played as a write that!). The upside is that I started to, and genuinely did, lose weight. Probably about a stone over the couple of months that followed until I started to find all the sweet milk-substitute puddings and snacks that I’d so dearly missed. A big shout out to Rhythm 108 at this point. Do look them up if you’ve never heard of them!

While not being able to eat flapjacks was a pain; not eating them certainly had its benefits. We take Piglet swimming once a week. We’ve done it virtually every week since he was about 6 weeks old. He loves it and it’s worth setting the earliest alarm clock call of the week on a Saturday morning to take him (I tell myself). The pool is a hydrotherapy pool though so the water and just about everything else in the building is much warmer than your standard swimming pool. The changing rooms are just curtained off cubicles on the edge of the pool, exactly as you’d imagine: a couple of hooks, a slated bench, an uncomfortably flimsy and unreliable curtain and, invariably, the feet or thrown toy of a small child from the cubicle next to you. It sounds so silly but I realised after a few weeks without milk that the 20 minutes after you get out of the pool with Piglet didn’t have to be the living hell I’d been finding it. Bending down to change swimming costumes and nappies on the floor of a small cubicle in a room that was close to 40oC was never going to be pleasant, but I found that I got so frustrated, irritable and even angry at the pain of being bent double with my bloated tummy in the heat that my wife used to just kick me out half-dressed with Piglet as soon as we were decent enough to do so. She would stay to finish getting changed, collecting together our belongings, wringing out wet clothes and come to find us outside once she’d finished. Without milk, I now find that I can do the whole thing calmly in about half the time on my own!

The list goes on. Rightly or wrongly, I now find that I struggle less with the following: There have been the obvious improvements to stomach pains and general toilet stuff but also I can bend over more (putting on my shoes and cutting my toenails doesn’t make me angry any more!!), I find that the heels of my feet are less cracked and itchy – this genuinely used to keep me awake at night, I get angry far less and I no longer suddenly find that I’m much too hot and irrationally strop about it until I’ve cooled down. I have no idea whether these are really linked or not but I’m happy they’re less of a problem either way.

I feel much healthier now than I did a few years ago. I tried on a new shirt the other day in a shop and was delighted to see that it fitted nicely. Not just because of losing some of the excess weight but because I didn’t have a big bloated tummy that had become a permanent fixture of my post-university years. My face looked better too. Less prevalent were the sunken eyes and big bags underneath them. But more generally I just looked healthier.

And that is worth asking to see the allergen menu for or cooking peppercorn sauce from scratch using oat cream for or watching, green-eyed with envy, as my friend tucks into their 5th slice of pizza. Of course, it’s easier to do some of those things when you’re not having to do them on your own – but that’s getting ahead to my next post.

Toodle pips

x

Episode 4 ->