So, I got a diagnosis. Sort of. It’s kind of confusing. Okay, it’s really confusing. So, my rheumatologist thinks that I have Sjogren’s Syndrome. Though I had previously thought that that had been ruled out because I had had a lip biopsy come back negative. However, he pointed out that, for the biopsy to be positive, they had to surgically rip out salivary glands that have the inflammation and Sjogren’s may not be in every single salivary gland yet.

So, I asked him how sure he is. He said that all of my symptoms could be related to diabetes, but not just any diabetes, un-controlled diabetes. My A1C (a blood test that determines the average of the last 3 months of blood sugars) has always shown that my diabetes is under good control. Not only that, but I started having these symptoms  (fatigue, brain fog, anhidrosis, neuropathy) AFTER the diagnosis and when it was under good control.

But, I tested negative on the blood test and tested negative for the lip biopsy. So, it is very confusing.

In other news, my spine is degenerating, my liver is fatty, my pancreas has atrophied, and my spleen has punctate calcification (calcified buildup). We don’t know what’s causing all of that. Possible causes may be autoimmune hepatitis, autoimmune pancreatitis, and don’t know about the spleen. We don’t know for those yet. There’s still unanswered questions, but my rheumatologist isn’t giving up, which is something I was very anxious about before I went.

Cooking I did this Week

I was only able to cook 2 things this past week because of fatigue. The first thing I cooked was cheese crisps on Thursday morning. I’m working on the recipe because I want to perfect it before I share it with you. It’s definitely not perfect yet because I burned the edges. So, look for that recipe once I can actually, you know, not burn them.

The reason I got fatigued was I got new glasses last Thursday, and they were bifocals. I was wearing regular glasses Within 20 minutes of putting them on, I started getting a headache that didn’t go away even when I took Advil. Within a day, I wasn’t really able to cook or process things that were going on around me.

On Sunday, I just decided that the bifocals were not working. The next day, I was able to make fresh bread. That’s right, fresh bread. I used King Arthur Flour’s Gluten-Free Focaccia bread recipe and it actually turned out amazing from a from-scratch recipe. That’s not to say the recipe would be bad if it didn’t turn out amazing, I just usually suck and fuck up from-scratch baking recipes. But it turned out perfect. Here’s a picture of it.

You cook the bread upside down, which means you coat the bottom of the cake pan with the stuff that will be on top and then flip it once the bread is cooked. This technique has inspired me to think of other upside-down things I could make like this. I think I can see a bunch of applications to recipes, depending on if it would work for those.