by phyrehawke » Mon Apr 09, 2012 8:25 am
Wow...One of the weeks I did better with my pain I made albondigas soup...with *nopales*! They are easy to get here in SD! I'm pretty sure the reason they are so helpful is that gelatin-like stuff they make such large quanties of once you cut them open. I've done a LOT of homework on that amino acid/neurotransmitter lately. It is one of the ONLY natural brakes for NMDA, which is the chemical that often causes us so much spinal cord pain in SM. NMDA is the stuff they use ketamine and methadone to calm down when it starts making the pain super severe because the level gets really high. Normal narcotics just don't work on that kind of pain very well because they chemically aren't designed specifically for it, and I think that's what a lot of spouses (and general doctors) just don't understand, as things get worse and one thing after another fails.
Anyway...the glycine principle extends to all foods that make it. Our bodies are supposed to make glycine, but I have a theory that our bodies either don't, or can't make enough of it, or it's getting blocked somehow (and sometimes by the meds we take, like topamax might block it at some stage). When we made more whole food from scratch and didn't waste anything, our diets were much much higher in it. It helps to relax muscles and it's a little sedating. It can help you sleep. It works like brakes in the nervous system and slows things down. It's a protein amino acid that behaves like a gelatin, so you find it in things like pudding and jello (yes, it's why they serve a lot of Jello in hospitals for dessert, to calm you down lol), and egg whites. When you slow roast/boil whole chicken, turkey, or meats from scratch it's the gelly goo that congeals along the edge that isn't fat. It's also in tuna, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, soybeans, peanuts/PB (but you have to consume way too many calories of peanuts/PB to get enough of it to make a difference). It's also the goo that holds lunchmeats together. Bacon and sausage are high in it. I hadn't been getting hardly any in my diet because I'm allergic to sodium phosphates, which are used as a preservative in almost all lunchmeats, bacon, sausage, and in jello and puddings to keep them from clumping.
We couldn't figure out why I was on all these pain meds and they weren't working very well at all. And I have wicked insomnia (due to apnea)...that alone was cause for arguements with the spouse. Try explaining how you can take this much CNS depressant medication and not sleep more than 3-4 hrs/night! lol At least some of it was because I was almost entirely missing this amino acid, and for some reason I don't seem to make nearly enough of it. I was losing a lot of weight really fast, and by loading down on homemade foods high in glycine I managed to stop that. Now my pain level is down quite a bit, and I'm getting a little more sleep...sleep study is next week and we'll find out more then.
Another thing...hubby's friend forwarded a youtube link about how coconut oil is showing improvements in alzheimer's and ALS. ALS was one of the first things the neurosurgeon ruled out when I came to him in 2005, and after I had more symptom progression after yet another accident I swear I wanted to go get it ruled out AGAIN. I'd heard good things about coconut oil before, and I don't see how it could hurt anything to try it for awhile. So I started mixing 1Tbsp of coconut oil into my warm milk, with a little sugar every morning. That seems to be making a difference in my pain level. I had a major improvement in the brain fog when they got a lot of my pain under control with new meds, but the coconut oil really seems to sharpen me up quite a bit so I'm thinking a lot more clearly after years of chronic pain brain fog. It's very nice to have my brain back, lol.
Rozanne/phyre
"A path of awakening would never suggest that we should be a passive and unwitting spectator of our own repeated disasters, but should turn the power of our attention to untangle the web of complexity." Christina Feldman