It began in July, when I woke up to big red welts all down the insides of my legs. My doctor assured me they were only hives--a reaction, probably, to something I had eaten, or the heat--and they would be gone the next day. But they were not gone the next day, or the day after that, or any day after that for 102 days.
Over this time, the hives got worse. On some days they were not so much welts as a terrible second skin: puffy, cherry red, and itching like a motherfucker. I scratched until I bled. I began to look enviously at people on the street--the obese, the homeless, the insane--and consider them lucky.
I tried everything: acupuncture; vitamins; Barleygreen extract mixed with apple juice; steroids; skin-prick tests; five different antihistamines (all at once) in doses large enough to knock out a horse. I cried in every practitioner's office. When a friend suggested I try her naturopath, I cried in advance resignation.
I made an appointment to see Dr. R. After filling out a questionnaire as long as a final exam and conducting a string of disgusting and expensive self-tests (including taking stool samples), I was allowed an audience with the doctor. She gave me a cheerful lecture about my intestines and the war between the good and the bad bacteria there (not unlike a Sergio Leone film). Dr. R. favored a didactic approach, with charts and pictures that she annotated with smiley and frowny faces to show where I was and was not healthy. And then she brightly broke the news: In order to be treated for the hives, I would have to first undergo a six-week detoxification diet to prepare my body for healing, and perhaps target the cause of the hives.
A detoxification diet, or elimination diet, meant I could not eat the following high-stress foods (are you ready?): dairy, wheat, eggs, corn, citrus, peanuts, soy, chocolate, beef, caffeine, sugar, garlic, alcohol, yeast, or anything from the nightshade family (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant). I would have to drink a glue-like protein shake at least twice a day, and, for part of the detox, as often as five times a day. I reeled.
A brief word about food: I love it. My mother's rule was that we had to taste everything at least once, this being her theory about how not to raise picky eaters. It worked. I've eaten sweetbreads, tête de veau, pigs' feet. I've cooked for myself for as long as I can remember. I've worked for food writers; I've reviewed restaurants; I've edited cookbooks. It's true that sometimes I eat a tortilla for dinner and call it a night. But not very often.
Shame, however, is a powerful tool, and I had already sunk a lot of my savings into Dr. R.'s program and self-tests. And Dr. R. had a demeanor that did not brook disagreement. She simply assumed that I would comply, and, spinelessly, I did. On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store and read some labels, quickly realizing that most foods had a hidden bomb, either potato starch or corn syrup or soy protein. Eating out would be next to impossible. I walked around the produce section in a depressed fog.
The first week was the hardest. I had a crashing headache from all the toxins (I was told) being dumped into my bloodstream. As someone who has quit smoking upward of 20 times, I assumed that I wouldn't be able to stick to the regime. But I bucked up. I made a huge pot of rice, bought a mountain of fruit, and roasted pounds and pounds of those root vegetables that people claim to love: beets, parsnips, turnips. I roasted chickens and pan-fried fish. I made huge batches of rice noodles stir-fried with dal and jalapeños (exceptions, somehow, from the nightshade ban). Snacks became a form of religion; in my bag I carried pumpkin seeds, bean dip, apples, and carrots. At night I'd go to bed with my healthy food and my antihistamine cocktail in me, and I felt--to my utter surprise--calm and safe.
My skin was clear and luminous; my hair shone. I had energy; despite all those antihistamines, which should have had me dragging myself along the sidewalk with my fingernails, I was awake and alert. Instead of feeling constrained by what I couldn't eat, I began to delight in the strictures. When I craved pasta or a BLT or a bowl of pho, I actually enjoyed quashing my desire for it. I imagined my body as a flame burning away impurities, slowly growing brighter, my soul becoming concomitantly clear. I was becoming a kind of saint; addicted, in short, to denial.
I am entropy's easy target, but this diet imposed order on me. Waking up early enough to mix a day's worth of protein shakes, going to the market on the way home to buy food for dinner--these things organized me, released me from some of the free-floating panic that forms the soundtrack to my life. I had no power over the hives, but I now had some power over this anxiety, and therefore over my mind.
After three weeks of detox, Dr. R.'s nutritionist told me it was time to re-introduce the high-stress foods, one every two days, to find out what I might be allergic to. You would think after weeks of carefully eating inside the lines I would have been overjoyed to have soy sauce or scrambled eggs or ketchup. Instead, I balked. My hives, which weren't any better, had become beside the point. The point was that I didn't want to let those dirty foods into the cordon sanitaire I had drawn around me. I managed to stretch the detox diet to over two months.
Eventually, of course, I had to let go. Eventually I had to stop seeing Dr. R. when my savings ran out and she suggested, after drawing a big smiley face by an illustration of what my new healthy intestines looked like, that I should do another series of self-tests to see where I stood. Eventually I had my first bite of pancetta, my first whiskey sour, my first Greek salad--the earth did not open up and swallow me; I didn't immediately vaporize. Eventually the hives went away, and I had no idea why (very probably because of anti-viral drugs). Eventually I slid back into my sloppy eating habits--too much here, too little there. But it didn't matter. Evidently I am not meant to be a saint, but perhaps I am someone who will go on a pilgrimage from time to time.
