Day 6It's a bit of a sad update today. I had a hideous night. It started well where I was tired and sleepy getting into bed. But, just as I was dropping off, I'd wake with a jump - it was like some deep and primal part of my brain just wouldn't let me 'let go' in the way you need to do to fall into a deep sleep. This happened several times over and over. And then my brain just decided it wasn't going to get to the falling asleep stage again, because look what happens every time you try that... so I laid there awake until 3am. With my hands and body pulsing and throbbing and trembling and my heart beating hard and faster than usual. Not so much the palpitations.
This is probably the worst insomnia I've had because I usually have no probs actually falling asleep, I just wake up a few hours later. And usually even if I can't go into a deep sleep, I can doze. This was just really alert wakefulness until 3am. And I knew I just couldn't go on for another week without trying to change something and fix this. It has now become a crisis rather than just an inconvenience I can fiddle around with.
So at 3am I got up and went into the kitchen and took an anti-histamine. I've never taken one before so I had no idea how I'd react to it. I didn't notice a profound difference but at 4am I was able to fall into a light sleep. The anti-histamine might just have made me a bit sleepy rather than resolve anything else - I was still throbbing and still had a hard and faster than usual heart rate, it definitely didn't immediately restore normality. And that throbbing and hard heart beat lasted right through until 8am as usual.
SO: This morning, I decided to reduce my estrogen to 50. I feel like a failure, doing that. Because my estrogen was only 233nmol on the 50 patch and I wanted to get it just a little higher so it was over 300nmol. And I'd originally gone to 75 and dropped back to 62.5 so this just feels like I've totally lost everything I'd gained now. I can try an increase again, though, if I can stabilise everything else. And maybe it will take me YEARS to increase, I will need to go so slow and cut patches so small(!).
I also got the zinc and quercetin I'd ordered delivered in the post, and I've taken both of those. I'm still on the low histamine diet. So I've kinda been not very scientific now because I've changed multiple variables at once. But that's because I feel like I'm in crisis mode now and if I adjust one thing at a time, this could all take weeks and months - and I just can't go on like this for much longer. The new approach is 'do everything at once to feel better and then (if I ever feel better) try stopping or dropping or changing things'. So instead of add something in, one thing at a time, it'll be drop something out, one thing at a time. But I'll be starting from a place where I feel okay rather than feel like I just can't go on.
I am not sure I'm going to continue much further with the diet. After 6 days on it, you'd think I would be seeing definite improvements and I'm just not. It doesn't mean my issues are not mast cell related - they might still be, but just not gut-and-mast cell related. It might be related to how I process estrogen or to the estrogen causing the mast cells to degranulate and release histamine. If I do start to feel better over the next week, it could now be due to the reduction in estrogen or starting these supplements, and I don't want to end up superstitiously eating this crappy diet just because I think it could be the diet(!). I might even change my progesterone regime now too, doubling the utrogestan to see if more body identical progesterone balances the estrogen.
But I thought I'd write a conclusion to the early end of the experiment...
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Topic: 2 week low histamine diet trial - keeping me accountable!! (Read 5139 times)