This is part 1 of the narrative of my disease development through young adulthood, middle age, and menopause.  I’ve also developed a bulleted list of the disease progression over time and a family tree of the generations of this disease in my family.

Childhood

My childhood was ideal by many measures. I grew up on a farm, only wore shoes for school and church. We had pigs, chickens, cows, goats, sheep, dogs and cats. I got exposed to all the healthy bacteria in the dirt while I cared for those animals. My mother gave birth to me as naturally as possible in the 1960’s. She doesn’t remember it, but I was born vaginally, so I should have inherited all her healthy microbiome. And yet, here I am in mid-life being told I have an autoimmune disease, that my body is attacking itself.

All my googling continues to point to gut health as the origin of this disease, but my doctor says there is no such thing as a leaky gut.

So I continue to search for the root cause of my illness and part of that includes reflecting on my upbringing. We did have to spray the fields with herbicides and pesticides. Sometimes I would get hot and the bugs would be so annoying I’d spray the herbicide or pesticide on my legs to keep the bugs off. I also developed a healthy sweet tooth early in life. We often had extra mouths to feed and as a daughter, I was responsible for maintaining a steady supply of cookies, cakes, crumbles, cobblers, homemade ice cream or anything that meant quick calories.

I wasn’t a sickly child although I got a lot of sinus infections around first and second grade. I remember because I was forced to eat breakfast and sometimes the phlegm was so bad that I would gag. One day I threw up on the front steps as I was walking out to the car (I’m pretty sure I got spanked for that). In second grade I was so sick that I couldn’t attend Easter Sunday mass and I was afraid I would go to hell for missing that mass.

I always felt bloated and fat as a kid and if I’m honest, I was a gassy person through my 40’s. I also realize there was always a sense of pressure on my pelvic floor (which becomes relevant in some later stories). Stinky toots were just considered normal, not something that signaled a problem.

We had a very regular breakfast routine. Eggs, bacon, and toast was the norm. One day a week we had pancakes and on Sundays, we would have breakfast cereals. We HAD to eat breakfast. I hated it.

Lunches in the summer on the farm were a health bonanza even though almost everything was fried. Venison, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, green beans, corn, peppers, and potatoes were plentiful throughout the summer. School lunches probably were not that healthy though I don’t specifically remember.  Everyone ate lunch in the cafeteria where I grew up, or at least that was what I thought. The lunch ladies cooked the food from scratch, not from prepackaged frozen prepared meals.  But as I look back it probably was not particularly healthy; a lot of calories probably came from bread products. And there was always a dessert. I loved the No-Bake Cookies and soon made them after school any chance I got.

There were food subsidies for farmers, which were not exactly healthy. Food subsidies provided my first exposure to real butter and it transformed my cookies. We also got a “food product” that was supposed to be cheese. One summer mother decided we needed to cut back on the sugar in our tea, so we gradually transitioned to unsweetened tea. That was so tough on everyone and created a lot of drama at the time, but I am so grateful today because cannot drink sweet drinks!

I am fortunate. I am not deathly ill. I actually enjoy learning about this topic and have now read about 20 books on the subject. I am wealthy enough to buy the healthiest food and experiment with supplements. This blog is my journey. I’m only about 18 months into experimenting with food, supplements, and gut bacteria, but I’m about 13 years into the first expressions of this disease (even though I still can’t find a doctor to connect all these dots). This blog is my journey.

Tell me about your journey.