Health Tips for Allergy Shots

HealthNFitness Tips: Allergy shots can provide much-needed relief from watery eyes, runny nose and other allergy symptoms. But the shots aren't for everyone. The American Academy of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology says they're not appropriate for Food allergies.

Before deciding to begin allergy shots, the academy says you should consider these factors:

* The severity of your allergy symptoms.
* How long your allergy season lasts.
* The effectiveness of antihistamines in treating your allergy symptoms.
* Your desire and ability to take antihistamines and other medications over the long-term.
* Your ability to visit an allergist consistently to get allergy shots.
* Your ability to pay any costs associated with allergy shots.


High Fiber Foods for a High Fiber Diet

A product or a food can with the words "high fiber" if it have more than 5 grams of fiber per-serving. Benefits of fiber-rich foods are the prevention of weight maintaining, constipation, lowering cholesterol, and more. Read our list of low-fiber foods and replace with the following foods when possible
High-fiber foods:

Cereal:

rolls, Whole wheat bread, muffins, bagels
Bran Flakes, All Bran, corn bran , Bran buds, 100%, Bran whole wheat bread Shreddies and Fiber 1
Cooked cereals such as oat bran and Red River
Whole wheat pasta
Whole grains such as corn, rice, barley and popcorn

fruit:

Dried fruits such as raisins, prunes, dates and apricots
Worn as strawberries, blueberries, blackberries raspberries and
Oranges, apple with skin, kiwi, avocado , pear and mango

vegetables:

Chard, peas , broccoli , spinach and other dark leafy greens
beans and dried peas, beans, black-eyed beans, lima , lentils and chickpeas

Nuts and seeds:

Seeds and nuts such as Soynuts, whole flaxseed and almonds


Ways to Boost Metabolism

Hello, you want to learn how to increase your metabolism? The number one way you can do is to work. You will need some cardiovascular work. Whether by bike, and came to a local gym, participate in some classes, weight training is always optimal. In addition, some things you can do at the club and the exercise is to eat. Protein is always help increase your metabolism. Protein is the cornerstone of muscle. If you have a tone that always burns for you. One hundred calories a day, at rest, a pound of muscle use. So you can see how that is optimal for burning calories. Protein will always supply the muscles. And when you feed your muscles, and you are not feeding fat, it will not stay. The more muscle you have in your body faster your metabolism will be.

Day 85: Shiny unhappy people


As a warning, if you are looking for a chipper cancer blog, this ain't it. This is a heavy one, and I will not be offended if that turns most people off from reading it. Don't worry, I will keep it together in the long run, but this is where I'm at right now and I need to get it out.

Back when I found out I needed a second surgery, I started my blog by saying that this is not the blog I expected to write today. Well, I'm back in the same boat. I was going to update on the many ridiculous things that chemo has brought into my life. On Monday, after I wrote last, my nausea was so bad that I gave in and tried the last anti-nausea medication they had given me back on July 7, which I had never used. Within 45 minutes of taking it I was vomiting uncontrollably. This was happening as Gabe and the kids were pulling into the driveway. I was going to write about how after chemo #2, I didn't eat hardly anything for almost a week and I got down to 110 pounds and was so weak from the lack of food that I couldn't stand it. About trying acupuncture again, this time for nausea and the extreme stomach pain I was feeling for days. About how all of my mucous is gone, everywhere, in my body. About how excited I was to be able to eat last night and today, and to see the scale get back to 113. About meeting with the radiation oncologist and finding out that I am not a candidate for a reduced radiation schedule because the one DCIS tumor that I have (stage 0 cancer) happens to be grade 3, unlike my other grade two tumors, so I will need to do the full 6 and a half weeks.

But I'm not going to write any more about any of those things tonight. I can start by saying that chemo has turned my body into a bone. I don't even have tears anymore. I was down and upset the other day and I started to cry, but very little happened, and not for lack of trying. Just a few drops. I thought it was some kind of metaphor until I realized it was just the extreme dryness brought on by chemo. I have never wanted a good cry so much in my life.

Until tonight.

I have just spent the last hour with my husband, having my little buzz shaved off for good. I really liked it for the two weeks that I had it, more than I expected. I felt comfortable going out in public with it. But I couldn't stand how it was coming out constantly, even while I was brushing my teeth, even while I was wearing a scarf. My head was hurting all the time with the little hairs pulling, making it hard to sleep. I was starting to look like I had mange. So Gabe got his new clipper set out and went to work. I just looked more ridiculously mangy and we both agreed that wasn't good. So then he got out the Barbasol and safety razor and started a long slow process of shaving my head smooth. I started to cry those dry tears and I'll admit I'm doing it even as I write. What kind of fucking medicine makes it so that you can't even really cry? Gabe is more of a cryer than me by a large magnitude, so that started him off as well. There we were in the bathroom, both crying, hair all over the floor, my hair all over his shirt. He said he never had a father to teach him to do this right (to which I wanted to say, do fathers and sons often shave each others' heads? but you know, I don't have an answer, being a girl), and even if he had, he never in a million years could have pictured himself doing this with me.

There's the whole in sickness and in health part of your marriage vows. But then there's standing in your basement bathroom with your wife wrapped in a towel, sitting on a stool, while you shave off all of what's left of what used to be her really pretty hair and then you take the expensive after shave that your mother in law gave you for christmas years ago and rub it all over her head, feeling guilty that you gave her razor burn. And you tell her that she looks sexy, though she knows that's a lie. Some might say that that is real love, or devotion. And I know that it is. But it is also a reminder of what marriage is not supposed to be at this age, or at any age. We should have been watching a movie together, having sex, arguing, cleaning the house. We should have been doing something else.

I feel like that's what it comes down to--I should be doing something else besides cancer with my time. I don't feel sorry for myself but it is just hitting me over the last few days what a colossal bunch of bullshit this is. And now how will I go out in public? How will I do what I've been doing and pretend to be a somewhat normal person? Maybe in a few days I won't feel so bad, who knows. This is the first time since I received my diagnosis that I have felt regret. And yet, I don't know what else we could have done. My damn stubborn hair was coming out, but SO slowly. It could have taken days, weeks, and I would have had that stinging pain all the time, reminding me, and I would have been left with less and less patchy fuzz. So maybe I should ask for another vote. Do I look so ridiculous that I can't go out in public like this, a totally bald woman who can't pass herself off as edgy anymore but is screaming, look I have cancer! Do I need to cover up? Because now there's no going back, not until the roots come in many months from now, so I need to know how to behave.

That's the other lesson of tonight I guess. There's no going back, not with any of this cancer shit. I've started chemo, wanted to stop, but why? Because I don't want to keep suffering for the next three months, but the poison's already in me, so what's the point in stopping? It would piss everyone off, make people worry about me, and leave me with no other options because of this damn triple negative thing. So on I'll go.

And there's no going back to how things were before, even with the kids. Augie turned 14 months old today and it's been breaking my heart now that I've had time to think about how things have changed with him. I stayed home with him for the first six months of his life, and I was pretty much his world. I was still nursing him often when I had to suddenly stop within a week of my diagnosis. I'll never forget his confusion when Gabe went in the second morning in a row to feed him his first bottle of the day. My one child who could actually nurse well! I had to pump all the time for Lenny--she wouldn't have known the difference if I stopped nursing. But fate doesn't care about those ironies. Augie still drinks a bottle better from me than anyone else, but it's not the same. And then there are the other things. After weaning I had two surgeries, which meant I couldn't pick him up for some span of days. And now I am so tired and weak--or at least I am for the week after each infusion, before I get a week's reprieve of feeling "better," that I can't chase him around, or I have days when I'm so shaky I can't pick him up. And now, the kid who calls his pacifier his Mama, reaches his arms up for Gabe to get him. He throws tantrums sometimes. I think he doesn't trust me. He loves me and he likes me, but he doesn't understand what's happened. I know he will never remember, but that's not the point. I will. I will always have that, the understanding of how cancer changed my relationship with my only son, my second and last child.

And then there's my daughter. What will Lenny say when she sees this head tomorrow? We were looking at a picture in her room, in a frame that says Mommy and me. I said we needed a new one because she's not even two in the picture. And she said, well, back then we didn't even know you had cancer. And you had long hair. Besides my shock at her saying "we didn't know you had" cancer (I probably did have it then--but how did she know that? shouldn't she have just said, back then you didn't have cancer?), I just wanted to cry again. How she wishes I was the way I used to be, or at least that I looked that way, as I do in the first photo you see here, taken just days after my diagnosis.

I think the image of me and Gabe in the bathroom sums up how some things have changed there. And things have changed with some of my friends, in good ways and bad. Some people are around less, and others have come out of the woodwork. I've heard stories of people I didn't know that well in high school finding out about me and sobbing. While that seems strange on one level, I get it. I know that this is really touching people who knew me as a kid, as a teenager, and it must be weird to think about someone you best remember as your childhood playmate, your junior high girlfriend, that testy girl in college, having cancer. Part of it is because you think, well shit, we really are all going to die, and part of it is that you think, well wasn't that just yesterday when we were 17?

And in a way, it was. But in another way, time just passes and passes. I'm just hoping I have a lot more of it to pass through, though in my darker moments like today I wonder. I wish time would speed up and get me through this cancer treatment but I know that won't happen, and even if it did that would just be more time I couldn't get back.

There are a few people in the world who will understand what I'm about to say. This whole cancer thing right now seems like the last two lines in Robert Creeley's Kitchen.

Perpetually sweeping this room,
I want it to be like it was.

Cancer Sucks: When Cancer Leads to Abrupt Weaning

When Ari was only seven months old, I was forced to wean him from exclusive and happy breastfeeding when an enlarged milk duct turned out to be cancerous. Due to my age, treatment needed to be swift and aggressive, involving a bilateral mastectomy. One day I breastfed Ari on demand, wore him wrapped tight against my chest, and slept with him skin-to-skin; the next day I mixed bottles of formula to hand over to my husband and moved to the other side of the bed, out of reach. 

This sucks, indeed. Thankfully, although she had to wean, Kelly found a new way to remain attached and bonded to her son: finger sucking. Like breastfeeding, Kelly soon found out finger sucking can sometimes be too intimate, embarrassing in public and uber demanding. Often the skin on her fingers would be raw from Ari sucking on them all night. Her emotional state caused her to lash out at him and she even tried covering her fingers with a glove to dissuade him from sucking. She says the sucking made her feel strangely exposed in a way that nursing in public didn't. She writes,Then, I felt important breastfeeding in public, a champion of all things natural and best for my baby. Now I just feel sad. My finger is a poor substitute for breastfeeding, and my baby and I both know it. It is evident in his continuous, never-satisfied suck and in my impatience.
Having to wean abruptly due to a cancer diagnosis is heartbreaking, but I loved the way the author and her son found a way to continue their nursing relationship. Another mom who was dealt this shitty hand is Jenn Michelle of the blog bits of myself. She had to wean her daughter Nugget so she could begin chemotherapy and in the meantime, they nursed like this


Luckily Jenn and Nugget were eventually able to resume nursing. Unfortunately Jenn learned in June of last year that her cancer is back. Kelly also learned that breast cancer had metastasized to her liver and has begun chemotherapy again as well.

Reading about these stories makes you hug your own baby a little bit closer. Even though I have been ready to wean, when my son asked for his milkies this morning when he woke up, I pulled him in close to me and gladly nursed him, thankful that I still had the option to do so.

Milk Samples Needed for Breast Cancer Research Study

As I've written before, I have the privelege of working with Professor Kathleen Arcaro at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on her groundbreaking breast cancer/breastmilk research.
Kathleen analyses breastmilk to study DNA changes in breast cells, which are naturally present in breastmilk, and their relationship to breast cancer. It's very gratifying work because a better understanding of these patterns may one day lead to new early detection, prevention and treatment strategies for breast cancer. Here's a sampling of some of the recent press coverage about this research.

Our current goal is to recruit African-American mothers to donate milk samples. Why African-American moms? Because Kathleen wants to ensure that her findings apply to all women, and to do that she needs a diverse sample of mothers participating. Having African-American moms well represented in this research is of particular interest because we have different patterns of breast cancer than women of other races. You may know that black women are more likely to get triple negative breast cancer, which is more aggressive and more likely to reocur, spread beyond the breast and result in death.
One of my main duties is helping Kathleen recruit moms to participate in her studies. The response to her work has been incredible, but we still need more black moms to donate breast milk! So, the UMass Breastmilk Lab is currently seeking:
•African American mothers who are nursing

•Living anywhere in the U.S.

•Willing to donate a *fresh* breastmilk sample (shipped via overnight mail at the lab's expense)

•Willing to fill out a consent form and questionnaire
Participants will receive $25 in thanks - and the knowledge that they are advancing our understanding of breast cancer! I hope that you can donate, or help us find moms willing to donate milk for this important research.
And if you're African-American (nursing or not), PLEASE consider signing up for the Love/Avon Army of Women, who are funding this important research. Please select "Breast milk study" when asked how you heard about the Army of Women.