Barons September 25th Update

Megan went to Disneyland this week with two of her aunts and three cousins. She seemed to have a good time. I think her favorite part was taking photos with the characters –

Last weekend Tyler went on an overnight trip with some of his WWII re-enactment friends up American Fork Canyon. They hiked for five miles then dug fox holes and slept on the ground with just a sleeping bag. He got lots of blisters from the boots but they got lots of cool photos that if you make black and white look just like the real thing. He chose this as his favorite photo –

Some of you may want an update on how my health has been. My “crashing” has been doing a lot better than when I was on my diet. Most days I only crash at dinner but I’m still crashing every day, sometimes not very bad but most of the time really bad.

I decided if I was going to feel bad anyway then I might as well save some money and stop taking all my supplements. Another reason to stop was I was wondering if some of them were making my crashing worse because that has definitely happened in the past.

I lasted about two days with no pills before my stomach started hurting all the time, especially when crashing. So I started taking the supplements that help with my stomach and I’m back to it hurting only occasionally. I also started my thyroid pills back up because I just can’t sleep well when I don’t take them. But I feel tolerable other than the crashing. However, a lot of my supplements help me long-term so I really shouldn’t stop taking them all together.

I got to the point one day when I felt really bad that I decided I needed to stop avoiding the subject and figure out what to do about my doctor. My old doctor is an option and I may need to keep going to her to get my anxiety prescription but she’s the one who told me to take the supplements that made my crashing worse and she has a three-month wait so I’m not excited about that option. She does take my insurance though. If I go there, I will just have to educate her on what PPAS (the abbreviation for “crashing” / Postprandial Adrenergic Syndrome) is. I think she will be open to it but she doesn’t have any experience with how to treat it, etc.

I called the place in Heber that was awesome when I went 8 years ago and they found the chronic bacteria infection and got rid of my RA by taking a low-dose antibiotic for 1.5 years. I stopped going to them because we switched insurance companies. There were quite a few things we did there that weren’t covered by our insurance anyway. However, now they don’t take any insurance so you have to pay for everything out of pocket other than some of the labs. I would consider going there again but I told them about my crashing several times and they didn’t have a clue what it was.

I got the idea to call the office of the guy who wrote the blog article I read online to first help me find out about PPAS and learn about it, etc. They do telehealth visits (over Zoom basically) and do their labs with places like Labcorp and some of them would be covered by our insurance. They also cost less than the place in Heber, which is kind of crazy for a place that specializes in my condition.

They also don’t take insurance, which I keep hearing about more and more, especially for DO’s (Doctors of Osteopathy – so they are real doctors that go to medical school but they also study all the natural subjects too. They practice what they call “functional medicine” which means they focus on finding the root causes of symptoms and fixing those instead of just treating the symptoms, which is what most “regular” doctors do. They are especially good to go to for people like me with chronic conditions other doctors can’t figure out.)

So now I’m trying to figure out if I want to go to the specialized place and pay out of pocket for a mostly unknown amount of money or try to find another option. I’m wondering if I can save enough money from not taking a bunch of supplements that make me worse and/or don’t really help the root cause to pay for this guy, who should hopefully only have me do things that help me feel better. What to do. What to do. . .