Advice????- Rachel Roberts

Advice? Most of the advice I have received up to this point has been generic and well, empty. Don't eat yellow snow, don't procrastinate, be yourself, eat healthy and take care of yourself... but that's when it hit me as I eat my gluten free vegan mac and cheese... if I ate all the junk I use to I would not be in a good place.

Ok story time. Freshmen year coming back from a choir trip in Florida, we stopped at McDonalds, where I got my usual chocolate milkshake and fries. All was well until about an into the bus ride, I was hit with a crippling pain in my stomach. As in I was in so much pain I couldn't move. I thought that it would go away if I went to sleep, but when I woke up it was still there. I kept eating the same way I had been, lots of breads and cheese and processed food. So that pain lasted up until I stopped eating dairy, it stopped for about two weeks then came back slowly to a even sharper pain. By the end of the school year I was at the point of being hospitalized. So my parents took me to multiple doctors throughout the state and even Cincinnati Children's Hospital. The told me everything from "it's just stress" to "you possibly have a hole in your stomach lining." But nothing definitive. And the pain went on and on, I was miserable.

About a year after the first incident, I got extremely sick and weak along with the usual pain. I went to an infectious disease doctor, who then sent me to someone at UK. I was put though many tests, one of which I had an allergic reaction to and ended up hospitalized for. But finally after all of that, and being in sever pain for over a year, I found out that I couldn't process foods high in FODMAPS due to a problem with my nervous system and was put on a low FODMAP diet. No gluten, only certain dairy, no soy, no high fructose corn syrup, along with restricts on what types of fruits and vegetables I could eat.

Life is bland, but I feel much better and learned that taking care of myself and watching what I ate was actually important if I don't want to feel like well death.