(t.m.i. disclaimer) Adventures in Gruesome Gut Land and GAPS diet

Disclaimer: "TMI" or "too much information" will be disclosed here, all about my guts. Fun times! So if you're more here to see recipes and KEEP an APPETITE I do suggest reading one of my other posts!

****************************** not for the faint of heart. ***************


*************still here? Ok then.....****

So let's backtrack 3 weeks. I went and weighed myself, dammit, 139 pounds. Not obese by any standards, and I'm also not all about being super thin, and it still puts me in the healthy BMI but...I just looked and felt unhealthy. I could be 139 pounds and healthy, but I didn't look or feel it. I looked 4 months pregnant and felt worse than that. Lots of bloat and fatigue and none of my pants fit. My shirts accentuated a beer-belly look I had going on.

Fast forward to a week ago.

****here comes the icky part.*****


Full disclosure here... I woke up and went poop and...the toilet bowl was bright red, like a super-heavy-period-day but....more blood. Lots of blood.

Now, when I have gluten I get a little blood, like a drop or two or three. And related to this, I am apparently not allergic to a single damned food, and don't have celiacs according to a blood test...however, to test positive for celiacs you must have been con suing wheat for at least 6 weeks. Given that whenever I eat wheat I get drips of blood and a vicious leg rash that itches so bad I end up inadvertently with a skin infection, its no wonder I'm "supposedly" not "celiac". Who'd want to have blood when whey wipe their bum, and a skin infection, for 6 weeks just to "prove" you have celiac? Not me.

So anyway back to the bloody bowels in the bowl thing. I thought ok calm down, its ok. So I have breakfast and stuff and....it happens again. Uh oh. Then it tapers off into regular old diarrhea. I start feeling realllllly tired and skip on church and rest on the couch all day which is impossible for me. The next morning I wake up and everything is ok down there. Phew! But I'm still a little tired so my husband goes to run errands and....you guessed it. I bleed a ton into the toilet again, twice in a few minutes. So we head to urgent care. Why not the ER you may ask? Cause that costs $500 and urgent care is $20. Both have doctors and labs and X-rays.

So I wait for three flipping hours to see the doctor. My gas is rotten. Farts never smell good but it is a smell I can't even explain except a skunk, who died in a port potty on a hot day, would smell better. No joke. I've smelled some rank things and this took the cake. Even when not farting, I just smelled. I bathed and bathed and just reeked. This was to my advantage though, as no one sat next to me in the waiting room. However, I was tempted to ask the triage nurse, "why have I been here three hours? Is everyone else worse off? I flipping have anal Ebola here, folks, and I smell worse than death."

Anyway I get admitted and have a CBC blood test and come out ok  aside from my mild anemia but that's normal for me and besides, I'm pooping out blood, I'm gonna be anemic. I have an X-ray. I get sent home with no diagnosis or medication, just "liquid diet for a day, bring back your stool sample asap".

It's day 4, no stool results yet. No diagnosis. But I am finally (knock on wood) done losing blood! The X-ray showed I was full of sh*t. Really. But umm...that's been fixed. But when I geek out and look up the radiology encyclopedia, I have textbook-perfect "thumb printing" typical of colitis. Colitis makes you poop blood. My grandma has it. So I'm pretty sure that's part of my issue.

So I go and see an herbalist and get put on the GAPS diet.

I can't eat much since my stomach has shrunk over the past week for obvious reason, but I am perpetually STARVING. Sure, I will eat a handful of steamed carrots and a slice of turkey and be all OMG I'm so full I could burst, but then half an hour later I'm famished. But being that I can only have broth with boiled meat, well-cooked bland carrots, spinach, squash.... I'm hungry. Besides I can't eat every half hour because my tummy isn't ready for that.

So today I'm going to try and make bone broth. I've had lots of regular old broth and stock, now it's time to make my own.

I guess you detox and get cranky and tired and poopy on GAPS at first. And you get cravings.

Most people crave sugar. Me? No. But starches? Yes.

I guess it shows that I do eat kind of healthy (even before GAPS) because instead of the typical cravings for pastries and pasta and candy... I am craving...
butter chicken, hummus, and salsa. Yep, those are solo my cravings. I want them NOW!

Well, off to go boil some chicken and bones for a zillion hours!