What Now

WHY A HEALTHIER DIET WILL END UP KILLING ME

I hadn't been feeling very well for most of the day yesterday. I was sleepy, sore, and just feeling yucky. My guess is that it was because of my allergies, or because I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, or maybe because I had overdone it at the gym that morning. I don't know, I just knew that I didn't feel well.

So lunch time comes around, and I wasn't really hungry, but I knew that if I didn't eat something I'd just end up feeling worse later on. I made myself eat the lunch I had brought, and lo and behold, I found a package of Sugar-Free mini Peppermint Patties in my bag. I had bought them so that I would have some not-so-bad-for-me chocolate nearby, and I completely forgot about them. I know, me forgetting about chocolate: it's a sign of the apocalypse, right? Anyways, I wound up eating three of them, which is the serving size, and they were softer than the regular kind and the filling felt cold on my tongue, but they tasted fairly normal so I didn't think anything else about them and I went on with my day. About 30 minutes later, I realized that I was feeling worse than before, but now I wasn't just feeling yucky, I was also dizzy and having trouble breathing! It felt like my throat was all fuzzy on the inside. I knew that it had to have been the stupid candy that caused it because it was the only thing I had eaten that was new to me. It hadn't been a sudden feeling, but once I realized what was going on, it took over my mind. Once it took over my mind, I did what I always do in this situation: I completely panicked.

I'm going to stop here for a moment and explain something about myself that some of you may already know. I'm terrified of suffocating. I'm guessing that it's not a completely irrational fear, or even an uncommon one, but for me it's very bad. It started when I was about 12 when one of my cousins was playing around and he put a pillow over my face and pressed down on it. He was so much bigger than I was that I couldn't push him off, and he had no idea that I really couldn't breathe! I almost passed out. Since then, any time it gets hard to breathe, even just a little bit, I get panicky. That is one of the main reasons I'm so claustrophobic.

So I'm sitting in my office, feeling this fuzzy throat feeling and thinking "I'm going to die. I'm going to stop breathing and die and no one will know that some kind of allergic reaction to something in those stupid peppermint patties is what killed me!" So I got up and walked downstairs, thinking that if I passed out around a lot of people, it would be more likely that someone would call Sickbay (our nurses station). It didn't help the panic much, but the breathing got a little easier. I came back up to our office and finally told my co-workers what was going on in case I really did pass out (which was starting to feel like a possibility) and I went back into my office and sat down. I finally realized that even though I my throat felt kind of fuzzy and swollen, it wasn't the biggest problem. It was more the fact that I was having a panic attack about it that was making it so hard to breathe. I tried to calm down, and it would work for a second or two, but then I'd start to panic again. I finally decided that the best thing I could do was take one of my anxiety pills, which I keep in my purse for emergencies. I knew that if I could calm down, then I could breathe easier. I haven't had to take one in a long time, thank goodness, so I figured that my tolerance for them was down enough so that it would start working quickly.

Well, it did work quickly. Actually, embarrassingly quickly. I took the pill, and about 10 minutes later I started feeling better. About 5 minutes after that, I started to feel sleepy. 5 minutes after that, I'd fallen asleep face down on my drafting table. I can't remember those pills having that affect on me before, but I know I'll be careful when I take them in the future! I actually have no idea how long I was asleep, but I do know that people came in and out of my office, and not one of them shook me or anything to see if I was alive. I told them I was having trouble breathing, and I was face down unconscious on my desk, but no one thought to check for signs of cyanosis or for a pulse or anything! Nice, huh? Maybe I was snoring or moving, I don't know, but I do know I'm going to check into getting a Medic-Alert button up here or something! All's well that ends well, I guess, because I wasn't dead. But if I had been, I would be haunting all of them so hard right now!!!

The truth is, I've had that same reaction to other kinds of low-fat or low calorie foods before, but I haven't been able to pin-point exactly what ingredient my body doesn't like. So far I know to avoid York's Sugar Free Peppermint Patties and Hostess 100 calorie Coffee Cake mini-muffins, but I can't remember the others that caused the same problem. Now I've just got to figure out what they have in common so I can avoid eating it in the future. Stupid diet foods. Trying to be healthy is going to kill me.