2 Years on GAPS part 3 continued

Yesterday I published the first part of my younger daughters GAPS story.
You can read it here. 2 Years on GAPS Part 3
I realized as I was writing it that it was just too long for one blog post so here is the second half of it.

Another big piece for J was my realization that she needed a Low Oxalate Diet. She was still in diapers when she turned 3 more than a year after we started GAPS and I began to wonder what I could do to encourage her to move on from them. Her older sister had wanted to potty learn and had been fully out of diapers by 2.5 of her own volition. A child who liked her diapers and wanted to keep wearing them was new to me. I blamed the disposable diapers I used on her for keeping her from knowing that she was wet. I was wrong. At some point after she turned 3 she began to tell me that her vulva hurt. Then she told me that it hurt when she peed. I had known that she had problems with high oxalate foods (sandy stool, cranky when I ate almonds) so I generally minimized the ones that I knew were high (spinach and some nuts) and believed that GAPS would heal this. When I realized that it hurt her to pee all the time I realized that I needed to get serious about oxalates. This led me to the Trying Low Oxalates Yahoo Group and the LOD version of GAPS that we follow today. Within a few weeks of going low oxalate she began potty learning and was able to be fully out of pull ups in the fall. For a while she would wet the bed overnight while dumping oxalates but lately not even then. She and I are now going through the process of dumping our stored oxalate. It isn’t always pleasant but it is a part of the process to get healthier so we press on.

I wish that I had a glowing report of the stunning health of my child who has been on GAPS for more than half of her life. She has healed many sensitivities (egg, dairy) but others remain. She is still very sensitive to oxalates in her food. She still has a distended belly although it doesn’t look nearly as bad as it once did. Her poop now looks normal and not like a tossed salad of the food that she took in. I am glad that I now know that she is now digesting her foods and getting nutrition from them. She hasn’t been severely sick in 2 years. She did have a tummy bug 2 weeks ago but it was very mild compared to the high fevers and severe sicknesses that she has gotten in the past. She is much stronger than she once was. I do think that if I would have recognized her need for a low oxalate diet much sooner and put her onto it she might be much further along in her healing now. We all make choices that seem right at the time but hindsight tells us that we might have benefited from another course.

So where are we now? She is 4 years old and still hasn’t ever eaten grains. Her favorite snack foods are the plain pemican from US Wellness meats and sweet red peppers. We are attacking her parasites with Diatomaceous Earth and Tic A Boo (from Be Young). She continues to be nourished by the GAPS diet and continues to eat a low oxalate diet and we pray for complete healing. She also tested positive for Lyme disease in the summer of 2010 as did I and her sister. We assume that Lyme is responsible for the weakening of her digestive system and her general lack of a robust constitution. She also has MTHFR mutations. I am slowly increasing her methylfolate intake to get those detox pathways working again. Remember that mercury breaks the methylation cycle at the next step after where the MTHFR mutation breaks it. She was born with an MTHFR mutation and then at 6 months old was poisoned by my mercury filling removal.

One more piece that we need to solve for her is her tongue tie. She has a mild anterior or classic tongue tie and a significant posterior tongue tie and a significant lip tie. These factors impact her ability to speak clearly as well as her ability to eat easily. It also impacts digestion and contributes to reflux and other problems. We are looking for the right doctor to correct these issues for her and hopefully can get that done soon. I have heard amazing stories of healing that has come with this type of correction and so I am hopeful that she might have one of those stories too.

The last GAPS story is my husbands story. His isn’t terribly dramatic since we started GAPS but he has seen great healing from simply switching to a whole foods diet from SAD. I’ll get to it soon I hope.