How many people suffer from health problems that doctors can’t find a cause for? It happened to me. This article is about dairy products and gluten. Unfortunately, doctors don’t know everything, although they certainly know a lot more than they did in 1938 when I was born. They still may not be able to diagnose people with food problems.
My problems when I was very young were colds and ear infections. I had a mastoid operation in 1947 that put me into the hospital for twelve days. I was given a penicillin shot in the rump every three hours, even while I slept. Thank goodness penicillin had been discovered before that time. The ear infections continued into my college years.
Many other people have had similar problems when young, including my three younger brothers. My father had environmental allergies, and we boys were all tested for pollen and other suspects. Based on the results, our allergist made up a mixture for each of us, and at one point several of us were getting weekly shots. Our family doctor was a woman, unusual for that time, and she gave us our shots in her waiting room, not even bothering to take us into her consulting room. I’m not sure the shots ever did any of us any good
As I grew older, some of my symptoms diverged from those of my brothers. I started having digestive problems, and sometimes a rapid heart rate, even though I was very active in sports. I remember one particularly bad time. Just before my junior year in high school, my parents and I had dinner at the home of old friends. The man, who had been our neighbor, kept shoving glasses of milk at me, and telling me how good it was for me. The next several days I felt awful.
In addition, I started feeling dizzy at times every day. These spells lasted for five years. I have learned that dizziness can be caused by either ear problems or eye problems. In my case, in spite of my ear problems, I eventually found out that my eyes were the cause of my dizziness.
In my junior year of college at UCLA, an ophthalmologist there said my eyes had low convergencies, meaning they didn’t converge (come together) well to see something in front of my nose, or diverge either. UCLA Health Service had a magical machine that I looked into and focused on moving objects. This machine trained my eyes to converge and diverge. It cured some of my dizziness problem, but I also had dilated pupils, which, among other things, affected sports such as playing tennis on a sunny day.
My spells of indigestion continued. Not long after I married my wife, Bonny, she had to call what was the equivalent of 911 at that time because I thought I was having a heart attack. The EMTs said my heart was all right (although rapid), but recommended I go to the emergency room. The doctor on duty there suggested I take Tums-like pills for my indigestion. They helped to relieve some of my symptoms, and I still take them. Other doctors suggested I take products such as probiotics to aid digestion, which didn’t help.
One day at Christmas time in 1973 (I was 35 years old) I drank a lot of egg nogg and became very sick. Bonny and I had an “aha” moment and decided I shouldn’t be eating dairy products, including milk, butter and cheese. Almost immediately my life improved considerably, which was a big relief for both of us.
Bonny, who studies genealogy, believes I have inherited a gene that won’t let me digest dairy products. We think it was inherited from my father who had dietary issues. He had bouts of atrial fibrillation (very rapid heartbeat) as he got older, which led to strokes.
Unfortunately, not all of my symptoms went away. I suspected I had other food problems, but didn’t know what they were. Watching what I ate didn’t seem to help, because I didn’t have a good plan for eliminating any food altogether, as a test. I lived with this situation until the year 2012, when I was actually dying. I was having uncontrolled weight loss and felt terrible.
Bonny and I were scheduled to fly to Europe and take a river cruise in October. I was debating not going. The first part of our trip was to fly from our home in California to Virginia where our son and daughter-in-law lived, so we decided that at least we could get good medical care, if needed. Once there, we automatically continued on to Europe where we’d been so often.
I was having a sleepless night on the river boat when I began to think about what I’d been eating recently. I decided that wheat might be the culprit. In the morning, Bonny agreed with me and we told the steward who was making sure my food contained no dairy products to add wheat to the list. We later modified that to gluten, which I had barely heard of at that time.
I felt some better almost immediately. Back home, I had tests. I had a colonoscopy (negative), and acquired a heart doctor. He wired me to record my heart for 24 hours, and gave me a treadmill test. One very good thing came of the treadmill test. He increased the speed and the upslope to a point where I was panting and could barely keep up. This told me that he didn’t see a serious heart problem. With this knowledge, I haven’t hesitated to take daily walks with significate altitude gains ever since, in spite of my age.
After almost ten years of having periodic treadmill tests, my heart doctor moved from California to Arizona. I didn’t feel the need to replace him. Now, I just have an annual wellness check with my regular doctor. In spite of a few of the aches and stiffness of old age, I almost feel like a young person.
I was born in 1942 and experienced some of the same childhood illnesses starting at four when our mother could no longer breast-feed my twin brother and I and we started drinking condensed milk. Humans are not meant to drink cow's milk, but we do. I had many colds, a few ear infections, and even scarlet fever. But Roger and I escaped polio and smallpox with vaccinations as well as the dreaded rheumatic fever that ruined some of our classmates' hearts.
Perhaps it was because we've spent our first two years grubbing in the mud around a farmer's yard, but I didn't have any allergies and finally proved it about 2000 when I had a test of twenty or so of the usual suspects and no allergy to any of them, including poison ivy that my brother had very badly once. But I do have irritations and aversions to things like some spices and perfumes.
But, by the time I was a teenager, I had what I called, an "iron stomach," eating mass quantities of my mother's good cooking and never gaining a pound on my skinny frame until I was around nineteen and started putting on muscle. However, spinal surgery that paralyzed me in December 1963 changed things. I immediately developed neurogenic bowel and bladder. I was always rushiing off to pee in the middle of things and had to accept it, along with accidents and diarrhea in the morning when I had cereal with milk in it. It wasn't until 1975 when a doctor at the West Virginia University Medical Center tested me and determined that I had moderate lactic acid intolerance. I started taking water instead of milk in my cereal and other things and immediately developed constipation in place of diarrhea. But it was better, except for occasional accidents. I never took laxatives or any other medications for it, like everything else, I accepted what the nerve damage in my spinal cord did to my body. When I was 65, I had a chemically induced stress test of my heart and vascular system. Found to be very normal because of my diet and all the exercise it took for me to just get through the day.
Of course, my neurogenic bowel has gotten worse as I have aged. One time during the rage about gluten-free this or that, I went gluten-free for about three months and discovered I had no gluten problems at all, but benefited from the fiber of whole grains that I've always eaten to keep my intestines free from cancer and polyps to this day.
Ron