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Thursday, August 12, 2004

no sugar added

We've known for quite some time that when T has a lot of sugar it pretty much puts him to sleep. Actually, to be more specific, it turns him into Frankenstein's monster for about forty-five minutes, and then he sleeps like the dead for at least three hours. Last year he went to the doctor about this, and the collective response of the doctors, lab people, and assorted medical persons can be summed up as follows:



Although we did have one physician's assistant do what is called, in medical terms, a total anal pluck, and determine that LT was depressed. Depression and hiatal hernias ... everyone's got 'em, right? They're the diagnoses of the 21st century. Anyway. The glucose screen determined nothing except that a near-comatose 230-lb husband is really difficult for his wife to get in and out of the car. Apparently even when a cup of syrup renders him unconscious, his blood sugar levels are still totally within the normal range. what. ever. So we've been kind of watching sugar for T, except when he was having a hard time sleeping and then we'd occasionally dose him up so that he'd drop off. The rest of the household continued as usual, with full-strength real-sugar syrup on our pancakes, and candy bars when we felt like it, and brownies and ice cream for dessert a few times a month. (sheesh, no wonder I stopped losing weight). Until today. Today we become one of those annoying no-sugar-added families, because we're pretty sure we've pinpointed sugar as a major aggravator of LT's Tourette's symptoms. And C and I certainly don't need it either. After all, my mom stopped eating sugar in 1986 because it gave her unbelievable mood swings, and she has stuck with it all these years and survived. So we can too, right?

Man, we must be totally crazy. --------