Vulvar Voodoo

Flashback to when I first told my gynie that eliminating gluten reduced my vulvar pain---

Sounds like voodoo to me, but whatever works!

Total voodoo; I still agree with that sentiment.  But folks, it's uncanny what diet does to my pain.

I've been casting about, looking for things to put in my body in exchange for the stuff I eat that might be hard to digest -- raw veggies, nuts, and seeds, mostly.  Cooking the veggies might help, but if I have to cook my asparagus I'm not going to eat it.  Blech.

So I turned to rice.  Rice is fine; it doesn't seem to cause me any extra pain or digestive problems.  Then I turned to rice products, because those are theoretically even easier to digest and they're also more convenient.  I bought my favorite gluten-free cereal, Erewhon's Rice Twice, and I got some rice milk instead of my usual nut or hemp milk.  (I'm still off dairy -- lactose causes so many problems for so many people, why mess with it right now.)

I knew that rice milk has all these stabilizers in it -- guar gum, xanthan gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum -- and I've read that those can be bad for IBS, but I thought I might as well figure out if they bother me.  Problem problem problem!  They do bother me!  A lot ouch ouch ouch!  In my coochie AND my gut!

So cross fake milk off the list, but there's another experiment in favor of the food theory.  Dear doctor: no experiment can prove voodoo.

I don't really know what to do now.  My diet is pretty stable as is -- mostly as I listed a few weeks back -- and I could probably stay on it indefinitely, but if I do will the pain recede over time, or am I still eating something that's setting me off?  There are a few ways to find out: chart food and pain by the hour (AUGH), reduce myself to an even smaller set of foods for a few days and rotate until I find the best set (AUGH), go on an all-chocolate-chip-cookie-dough diet...

The best medicine is TIME, Esther -- but I hate not having the full picture in my head.  I get restless.  I start planning ways to tease out the truth.  Maybe it's time for a vacation.  The Caribbean.  Louisiana.  Do they make anti-voodoo dolls?  PULL THE PIN OUT!!!