I'm not coping well....LONG VENT
bwralc
member
I've been on and off this board since it started. My daughter is dairy free and is still considered FTT at 2. Just after we started to go dairy free my FIL had a major stroke. He was single living on a farm a state away. My husband and I were driving 8 hours at the drop of a hat to go help him week after week, weekend after weekend. On our first trip there we discovered he was a hoarder and had tons of stuff filling the house and barns. We made it through, moved my FIL up here into a nursing home and did a auction to sell all of his stuff. Right after this my DH was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that is really not understood. It seems that it has brought on a lot of food allergies and we are going to an allergist to try to figure them all out.
Through most of this I have been a rock. I have taken charge to learn about going dairy free, found tons of new recipes and learned to adapt old ones, helped my husband coordinate everything with his father, was an advocate and scoured the internet and medical journals to help my husband figure out what was going on but now.....I feel like I have PTSD.
I know that sounds ridiculous but I feel like I can't cope with all of these food allergies. I've kind of shut down about it. With each new thing my husband seems to be allergic to, I have to remove that many more recipes from our list. Now I'm down to 2 recipes and I will need to search for more.
I'm not motivated at all. I feel I don't know, angry. Not at him or my daughter just in general. I know it could be so much worse but I'm still mad and I'm still struggling. I never see these posts on this board so i feel like a failure just posting this. What really annoys me is that when I research recipes for dairy free 90% seem to be dessert which I could care less about. Where are the Main dishes at? When I do find a main dish it always has crazy weird ingredients that I know my husband will never eat. We need to avoid tomato which is making it hard, gluten and dairy. The other allergies are mostly food dye and other weird stuff. I wish I could find soups, stews, crock pot recipes. He is a very meat and potato/pasta kinda guy. Sorry Vent over.
I also want to add that I feel bad posting this b/c I know a lot of you are coping with a lot more allergies than us and I really commend you all for how well you are handling it since I am a complete mess with just a few.
Re: I'm not coping well....LONG VENT
First off, that is a ton of life crap to deal with. I'm sure it must all be exhausting both mentally and physically!
This is somewhat unrelated to your question, but the first thing that popped into my head with your husband's autoimmune issue and the timing with which it cropped up was could it have been triggered by an overload of stress? I've been trying to figure out my own allergy-type of weirdness and I wonder if a large part of it isn't due to being over-stressed and sleep deprived.
I was going to write this in another post, but how do you feel about cooking without recipes? Could you shop for simple whole food ingredients that are all safe and cook on the fly? I find this works pretty well for me after I dropped my expectation of having delicious-sounding titles for meals and "plans" made more than a couple of days in advance. For example, tonight's dinner was slow-roasted lamb, roasted sweet potatoes w/ garlic and cucumber slices. No recipes required
I dump some dried herbs and salt on the lamb, stick in a 250? oven until it's falling apart. Cut up potatoes and toss with garlic slices, salt, olive oil and roast until soft. A quicker-cooking weeknight dinner is usually a broiled or sauteed fish or meat plus a steamed green veggie. Now that it's cold we are also loving crockpot meals - especially making up batches of chicken bone broth to use in soups and sauces. I keep it simple there, too. Broth, whatever veggies are on hand and some meat. Done. If you eat beans, that's another thing to throw in there.
If you do need some more specific guidance, check out some paleo diet resources. They will be dairy, grain (incl. gluten grain) & legume-free. Primal is a variation which includes dairy. And a variation on paleo specifically for addressing autoimmune issues also eliminates eggs & nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers etc).
Here are a few good recipe sites:
https://everydaypaleo.com/category/food/
https://nomnompaleo.com/recipeindex
https://www.primal-palate.com/p/recipes.html
And here's a "food matrix" from Robb Wolf to help spark some ideas:
https://robbwolf.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/thePaleoSolution_FoodMatrix.pdf
HTH!
Thanks so much for your reply. All things we have found and some Dr's we have been to mentioned that it is very common for autoimmune disorders to be triggered from stress. We do believe that is what triggered it since DH is usually so low key and nothing bothers him but this was a huge stress for him (DD being FTT and his Dad having the stroke).
As far as cooking on the fly I wish I was as talented as you sound! Oh my gosh
I NEED a recipe, since I'm not very good with cooking....at all. I will definitely check out the links you posted. Thank you so much for your response.
Holy cow - with everything going on in your life I would be in awe if you weren't overwhelmed at times! Do NOT feel like a failure. Everything foodwise will sort out, especially as you learn more and more about your husband's food allergies.
I can sympathize with the joys of adult onset allergies. It really is a lifestyle change that has to happen virtually overnight. A lot of my allergies became much more severe in the last few years, so while I have technically had them for a while I used to be able to "fudge" and indulge in foods with nuts, melons, etc. Ha - I used to just pick the avocado out of sushi and be fine with it, now that kind of cross contamination would be bad news bears.
Will you post a list of things you need to avoid? I'm sure someone will have some recipes that would fit the bill, or at least some ideas of things to prepare.
Ugh, yucko, so sorry you're dealing with all that!
You mention slow cookers. My DH is also a meat and potatoes kind of guy. There are two things that I keep going back to: Buy a small, whole chicken. Put a layer of potatoes on the bottom of the crockpot and the chicken on top of that (you can also add other veggies if you want), salt and pepper the chicken and a little olive oil and cook on high for four or five hours. Done. When I'm done with the chicken meat, I'll put the carcass back in the slow cooker with water and cook at low over night to make a stock. Drain in the morning and add veggies and any leftover meat, cook on low all day and you have great, easy soup. You can add other flavors with herbs and spices as you please.
My other go-to is chicken breasts covered in whatever pre-made italian dressing your DH can eat, cooked on low for six or so hours (until done, I leave mine overnight all the time). It pulls apart super easily so it can either be used as a main course or pulled apart to add to fajitas (just grill some veggies and get corn tortillas) or anything else you like.
I hope these help!!
Married DH 7/30/11
CSC arrived 5/7/12
CHC arrived 6/2/14
I wish i could help with recipes but i'm not that great with gluten free ones.
but i think avoiding tomatoes is even harder.. I found this website --> https://www.tomatoesareevil.com/tomato free recipes.html for all tomato free recipes. Some things call for dairy stuff, but you can just substitute vegan style creams and milks.
Good luck and hope you get a break soon! hugs
you do have a lot going on. I think it's remarkable you haven't had a breakdown until now.
When I first started to cook meals to include my son we ate grilled chicken/beef, potatoes and greenbeans for like a week. Because I knew it was safe. Learning how to cook for food allergies is a HUGE learning curve. And the FTT thing doesn't make it any easier.
For crockpot stuff- google "crockpot 365". She's dairy free and gluten free. The chicken and rice soup on her website is seriously a staple in our house. I make a giant batch in the crockpot and freeze part of it and we eat it at least once a week. The tomatoes are hard- but seriously find like 5 basic reicipies you can make and just rotate through them until you are feeling more confident/ready to experiement with the allergy safe cooking.
For the FTT stuff- have the doctors given you a reason that she's FTT yet? My friend's daughter was FTT and she started this blog:https://chunkymonkeymenus.blogspot.com/
And we never got an official FTT dx- but my son struggled with weight gain until he was almost 2 (and he's still small- but at least we're on the charts now). I adapted a bunch of those recipes to be dairy free for my son (use condensed coconut milk instead of heavy cream etc.) but it has a lot of good info on how to up calorie counts for a toddler.
I'm not going to add recipes, but I am going to address your PTSD comment. It's very, very likely that you could be suffering from PTSD. There is a tremendous amount of research happening right now about the effects of a diagnosis of a chronic illness on children and the parents. The early research indicates about 60% of parents with chronically ill children suffer from PTSD. The thinking is that the actual number is even higher because one of the common symptoms of PTSD is avoidance and those that are avoiding are unlikely to participate in research!
What you're experiencing between the FTT, DH's issues and the issues with your FIL definitely put you in a category to have this problem. If you're able, you should talk with a counselor - you need an outlet!
Also, I think every parent on this board can relate to your post at some point in time. We have good days and bad days. And as for some dealing with more than just allergies, it doesn't matter how much you're dealing with or how little when it's your kid/husband/family.
It's okay to feel what you are feeling. Hang in there and ask someone around you for help.