The Princess and the Pea

"I'm really nervous right now," I told my therapist a little over a year ago.  "I'm about...ninety percent sure my roommate is dead right now."  I sort of knew that what I was saying was totally ridiculous.  I had just left him at the house.  He had just had some kind of minor oral surgery and was home sound asleep on some mild narcotic painkillers, which had just been prescribed to him.

"Why do you think he's dead?" she asked me.

"When I left home, he was snoring really loudly," I explained.  I was grabbing at my own fingers, which were cold and jittery, like my voice.  "I get really nervous when someone snores.  When my best friend's little brother Dustin died...well I was the last person to see him alive.  We had passed out in the same bed that night.  When I left the next morning, he was snoring louder than I ever heard anyone snore before.  When Megan found him a couple hours later, he was dead.  He hadn't actually been snoring, you see...he was choking on his own vomit."

I continued my explanation.  "See...I don't blame myself for what happened to him.  I didn't know any better.  It wasn't my fault.  But now...now I know.  So if it happens again...it is my fault."

"No, NO," she emphasized.  But why was I so jittery?  I hadn't really thought about that incident in years, even through two live-in boyfriends who both snored.  Often.

It all started after I had picked up a couple of smoothies for my roommate and I during his surgery that morning.  I had gotten myself a berry banana smoothie with soy and whey protein powder added.  I had drunk the entire thing, even though I started feeling jittery from it half way through.  Was it the sugar?  We decided that day to blame it on the high sugar content.

But that hadn't been the only occurrence of jittery feelings I had had recently after eating something.  Actually, it had been going on for months, where I would eat something seemingly random and my heart would just start racing.  Once it was a frozen pizza.  Once it was a burrito.  Once, it was just a salad!  I  would eat something and my heart would start beating like I had just sprinted a mile.  Even lying down on my back wouldn't help.  I had to figure it out.  I had to eat better somehow.

One night I decided to make my own food (I almost never used to cook).  I made hominy.  It only had a few select ingredients.  It made my heart race worse than ever before.  I had no idea what to do!  On top of that, the last two times I had eaten at Pei Wei, my tongue had gone numb and I felt lightheaded afterward.  Then I had gotten the same feeling after eating some cheese crackers I had bought at the gas station on a car trip.  It was so random!  I looked at the ingredients...specifically, I was looking for "MSG," but it was nowhere to be found.  I had been suspicious I had an MSG sensitivity for a while but couldn't figure it out...it was never actually in anything!  Only in that Chinese food I had eaten about five years back that gave me feelings of impending doom after eating it, and the McDonald's veggie burgers in Germany that would make my nose run while I was eating them.  I read labels like crazy, and the restaurants I was eating at all claimed not to use it!  It was a mystery.

Then one day I ate some Quorn fake chicken nuggets and was severely depressed all day immediately after eating them.  Before I had eaten them, I had been totally fine and happy.  I knew it was what I had eaten.  That day I looked up "MSG sensitivity" just out of curiosity, even though it was nowhere to be found on the Quorn ingredients label.

Holy $***.  "MSG" can also be called "autolyzed yeast extract" or "yeast extract?"  MSG is called "texturized vegetable protein or hydrolyzed protein?"   Soy protein isolate (the powdery stuff) has a high percentage of MSG???  When corn is soaked (like, as in, hominy) it creates MSG?  Parmesan cheese is high in MSG???  This explains EVERYTHING!!!  There were a million things I was eating which contained the harmful component of what we call "MSG"...free glutamic acid. (Learned from "Battling the MSG Myth")

My body had been trying to warn me about this for years.  I remember when I was 10 I started breaking out in hives randomly.  It lasted about a year.  The doctor had blamed it on stress, unable to give me a definite answer.  Then in high school I had to stop chewing sugarless gum, because it was giving me insane heartburn.  Around college I realized that anything with hydrogenated oils hurt my stomach really bad, so I cut those out.  A few years later, people started hearing about how they were called "trans fats" and worse for you than cholesterol, so to my delight, they started taking it out of a lot of products.  I wasn't surprised when they figured out it was poison...because my body had already told me.

My body continues to whisper little secrets to me about what is actually poison.  I can't help it; I'm a frog.  An "indicator" species.  The first to die when the environment isn't right.  A few weeks ago, I started switching medications.  I still just use my doctors back home for both my prescriptions...I talk to them on the phone in Knoxville and then my mom fills the prescriptions they phone in to her local pharmacy in South Carolina and she mails them to me.  The week I began taking my new pill, I started having aching pains all over my body.  For a couple of days, my calf muscles kept cramping up at random, like a charlie horse for no reason.  It was really weird, and then it occurred to me what it might be.

The pain didn't stop until I began to rinse the blue dye off of my tiny pill every night.  Then it was gone, immediately.

I am the Princess and the Pea.  Even my friends are noticing these days.  A few months ago, when I was still at my other job, my two front teeth started turning see-through.  They looked blacker from a distance, but up close you could see that they were just clear.  There were lines of blackness forming along my teeth's inner veins.  I was sure they were rotting clear out of my head.

Then one night, I ate an entire stalk of raw broccoli and the next morning my teeth were white again.  Kim couldn't believe it.  She had just been noticing the day before how bad they were getting.  I just needed some more calcium.

Aaaah!!!  My teeth are turning black!  (Remember this, the night I had a staff dinner at my last school?)

Then this is me a little while later after I ate tons of broccoli.  Both pictures taken with my iPod.  My teeth are okay again!

I realize that my knowledge of the fact that certain common food additives like Citric Acid are actually made from moldy corn and shouldn't be consumed by anyone with either a mold allergy, a corn allergy, or an MSG sensitivity is totally boring and shouldn't be talked about more than once a year at the most.  I realize that it's not that interesting to hear about how hidden sulfites in certain foods, like any grapes (organic or not) grown in North America, can totally be what's messing up your digestive tract.  People don't really want to hear about the reasons I scoff at any sort of "Cancer Awareness" month because I think it's a scam, and that we should be more concerned about actual prevention of cancer.  I should probably just stick with telling tales of fat southern lesbians who believe in ghosts, or getting lost in Korean shopping mazes.  And mostly, I will.

Even in my travels out of the country, I have discovered how terribly toxic America really is.  Here in Korea, for example, I can eat at almost any restaurant I want to and not have to worry.  Back home, that's just not possible due to the vast array of harmful additives...enriched flour, for example.  And isn't it funny that other countries don't sell tampons, or antiperspirant?  That's because it's well-known around the world that those things are pretty toxic for our bodies.  I mean, instead of wearing a pink ribbon, wouldn't it be better to throw away your Secret solid?  Do your families a favor!

I understand that even thinking about changing their diet is the very last thing that 99% of people want to do.  And, that is totally understandable!  I just eat a very simple diet now with as few ingredients as possible...but I still make it yummy.

I just think sometimes...if there were an obnoxious pea under your mattress...wouldn't you want to know about it, before it like, turns into a tree or something?  After all...the frogs may die first, but other animals are sure to follow.