The Pepperoni Pizza Hypothesis

I'm up again, unable to sleep. Sleep will come, but it's taking a little while these days. It's finals week, so that's my background stress, but the pain has been distracting me every night since Saturday.

I eventually talk myself around the pain and into sleep. I get cluster headaches; if I can talk myself into sleep as one of those tapers, I can do it with a moderate crotch flare.

Really, what gotten me about the pain the past few days is the worry -- is it still there? Do I have to pee? What if I fall asleep and I have to pee? Some people with interstitial cystitis pee fifty times a night. My heart goes out to them.

Last night, after going to the bathroom a couple times, I had to pee again, but I told myself I didn't and fell asleep. When I woke up, the pinching pain that I had fallen asleep with was gone, and I had a full bladder but no urgency.

Which brings me to my hypothesis: a good portion of my pain, at least, is referred from my intestines, as researchers concluded in what they call the Pepperoni Pizza Hypothesis, which I wrote about earlier. I don't know why or how, but I do know my gut's been messed up with IBS for at least a decade and that I had a major intestinal, uhm, episode shortly before my vulvodynia set in. My crotch is raging and I've been funny-tummied for days: coincidence?

I'm still being vegan, and I still want to try going raw for all the claims its subscribers make, but I think my next step might be to switch to a really, really intestinally friendly diet and see what happens. Another experiment on my body, only this time with a more definite theory.

Whether my hypothesis is correct or not, I have a motto: I will find answers. I write it down so I can see it, on my walls, in my notebooks, here. The answers may not be contained to a diet change, I realize that. But somehow, I'm going to suffer through this thing and come out the other side with useful information. I'm not spending all this time hurting just to magically recover and never look back. I'll get through it, I'll find answers, and then I'll shout them from the top of the world.