While I have no trouble writing about my emotions in relation to treatments or life with chronic illness, telling you the details of my treatment makes me self-conscious of talking about myself. Here’s an update for those of you who are curious about my mast cell disorder exploration, success with the digestive enzyme diamine oxidase, and sorting of food triggers.
Mast Cell Disorders
The mast cell specialist was kind and knowledgeable. He did a full mast cell disorder-related work up (including the fourth time in a month that I had to do a 24-hour urine collection) and a bunch of food allergy tests. Everything looked great. No mast cell disorder and all negative responses to food allergies.
Mast cell disorders aren’t too well understood, so there could be other markers to test for eventually, but I’m not concerned. When I add up the results of those tests, my symptoms, the genetic testing that showed DAO-related mutations, and my great response to DAO, I’m pretty well convinced there’s no mast cell disorder here. For which I am very grateful.
Diamine Oxidase (DAO)
Sunday marked eight weeks since I started taking the digestive enzyme DAO with every meal and I’m still doing really well with it. I use the Histamine Block
brand most often, but occasionally supplement with Histame, which has a lower dose in each capsule, for drinks or snacks. I get heartburn if I don’t eat enough calories or drink enough water when I take DAO, but that’s easy to remedy. Other than the thrill of finding something that keeps me from having a migraine every single day(!), there’s not much to tell.
Food Testing
Unfortunately, I still have migraines most days while I continue to test (and react to) foods and sort out what my other non-histamine-related food sensitivities are. As soon as I recover from one migraine, I jump back into testing foods, which frequently triggers another migraine. Testing foods seems like it would be straightforward, but it’s extraordinarily complicated. There’s the food itself, but the build up of certain naturally occurring food chemicals, types of food, and even quantity also figure into the equation. I will spare you the boring details (which my poor, sweet husband has had to listen to for months). It’s messy and confusing, but I’m making progress. I’ve never been so excited to eat kale, cauliflower or zucchini and I’m over the moon that decaf coffee doesn’t appear to be triggering migraines or other headaches.
Related posts:
- Being a Human Guinea Pig and Digging into Clinical Research: Food and Histamine, Mast Cells and Migraine (Jan. 9, 2014)
- The Post I Never Thought I’d Get to Write (Jan. 23, 2014)
- Histamine Intolerance & DAO: Answers to Your Questions (Jan. 25, 2014)
- “Histamine Block” Does NOT Block Histamine! (Feb. 24, 2014)
- Diamine Oxidase (DAO) is Why I’m Doing Better (May 6, 2014)
- Testing if Your DAO Level is Low (May 12, 2014)