Monday, October 8, 2007

Crappy Crohns and Chocolate

I was diagnosed with a variant of Crohn's Disease about 6 months after my son was born at the turn of the century.
I've blogged professionally about my trials and troubles with this intense intestinal disease on the Healthtalk.com web site, under the "Living with Crohn's" heading. I think my three months worth of posts (twice a week) are still archived there, if you care to read them. I'm rather proud of having toughed it out with Crohns these past 7 years, especially considering I was working at the Mercer Island Reporter, raising a child and house-hunting all within that time frame. Few of my friends or co-workers even knew I had the disease, as I was able to take pain relievers and just soldier on when I had a flare up.
Now that I have had this disease for more than a few years, I can safely say that I have figured out what foods or situations are likely to give me a flare up that will send me into the bathroom for hours of pain and poop. My son calls my colon cramps "cranks" and knows that I need my heating pad and time to let the pain meds do their stuff when I am in full flare up.
But, though he always kisses my tummy to make me feel better, he can't kiss away my distress at my recent conclusion that chocolate seems to cause me to have flare ups. I just found a new kind of low fat, non dairy soy chocolate pudding in the Fred Meyer "Naturals" section, and though they're expensive and only come four to a pack, I had to buy these joyous little pudding cups as a treat several days ago. Unfortunately, though they're delicious, either the calcium carbonate in the mixture or the chocolate is at fault for the colonic cramps I'm enduring today.
Let me say right out that I've never been a chocaholic. I much prefer vanilla flavoring, or cherry, or cinamon, or other fruit flavors to chocolate. But there have been times when I've enjoyed, prior to becoming lactose intolerant, milk chocolate Milky Way bars or Lindt chocolate or even M&Ms. Once I stopped eating dairy in 1994, I found that high quality dark chocolate, eaten very rarely, really hit the spot when I was craving that delicious mixture of flavors that makes up chocolates 'mouth feel.' But I have discovered that there are few dairy-free chocolate alternatives available in most supermarkets. Paul Newman has an orange-flavored dark chocolate bar that is small, but not too bad, and there is some 'save the earth' company that also has a dairy free bar that I can eat, but its less sweet and more bitter than the Paul Newman bar. And now I have to decide whether to eschew chocolate altogether, because it seems to make me ill. I've become allergic to split peas and green beans and not shed a tear, but never eating chocolate again? That is to weep.

2 comments:

Rhonda Cook said...

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Marianne said...

I've got to tell you, that chocolate in and of itself is one of the worst things to my stomach. And one of the things i miss the most. That and popcorn. Sigh. Oh well.