I am a desperate, desperate woman

Most of you have heard my whining and complaining about my allergies - the hives, the itching, the way it messes with my sleep schedule so that I fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon only to wake and discover my daughter has cut off all her hair...or painted her nails and half the table...or cut up a perfectly good pillowcase...or spilled orange paint on the kitchen floor...or snuck off to her room with half the snack box...you get the picture.

After yet another episode today of "Mystify the Allergist", we have a new plan of attack. It's called Stop Eating.

Ok, it's not quite that drastic, but it's close. For 2 weeks, I am allowed to have rice, turkey, and lamb. That's it. I'm not even allowed any seasoning, and he specifically pointed out that salt is a seasoning. After 2 weeks, if the hives have cleared up, then it's a food allergy and I can gradually start adding things back in to find the culprit. This means that in two weeks, I can add, say, corn back to my diet. If there's no reaction over the following 4-5 days, I can pick a different thing to add and so on until we find something.

Yep, this is sounding far too exciting for words. Of course, if the hives *don't* clear up on the Stop Eating diet, then we'll have to keep looking and he was not too encouraging about all that since we've looked at everything else already. His opinion was that then there wasn't too much we could do except just accept the fact that I just have hives and someday they might go away all by themselves or they might never go away. Nice.

The allergist did mention that they used to put people in the hospital to administer the Stop Eating diet to remove them from every environmental/life factor that could possibly be affecting them. Unfortunately, health insurance companies won't cover that these days. Gosh, I was thinking it'd be kinda nice to lie around all day with nothing to do, except that I'd be bored out of my noggin after a few hours.

I do need to find something to keep my hands busy, though. I'm finding it really frustrating to not be able to snack *at all*, since there's not much about lamb, turkey, and rice that makes a good snack. I do have to admit that it's very filling; we had ground turkey patties and rice for dinner and I'm still stuffed several hours later (I wonder if Tums count as a "food"). The doc mentioned that most people lose weight on this diet and they complain that it gets really, really old (geez, whuda thunk it?), but by the time he proposes it, patients are willing to do *anything* that might help.

Heck, you gotta be desperate to agree to eat lamb, turkey, or rice for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. For 2 weeks. All I can say is that I'd better come out of this skinny! Oh, and I hope it gets rid of the hives, too.