Grocery List for Chronic Pain

Proteins

Ground hamburger

SteakPork cutlets

Chicken breasts

Chicken thighs

Ground turkey

Shrimp

Salmon

Firm tofu

Impossible™ Meat

Impossible™ Sausage

Impossible™ NuggetsEggs

I remember cheeseburgers - vaguely. I also remember the first time cows turned on me. Nothing spoils a day at the beach quite like puking your guts out. Especially when you’re a preteen attempting to catch the eye of the adorable lifeguard ignoring you from his perch on the watch stand.

It took a few more attempts at keeping my beloved McDonald’s Quarter Pounders down before I resigned myself to a life of poultry and fish.

(That “other white meat” was never high on my list of interest - and it never stuck around. Much to the shock of bacon fiends everywhere)

Then the world decided mercury poisoning was a concern. Better to implement a limit on fish consumption than clean up the industry, of course. But since I harbored a grudge for turkeys - carefully incubated from a childhood of torment from Grandma and Grandpa’s prize bird - I resigned myself to a primarily fowl diet. Within a few years, I didn’t even miss the bovine delights that everyone insisted on incorporating into their weekly meals.

And when science handed down its warnings against excessive red meat consumption, I was ahead of the curve.

It never occurred to me that the first blip was a warning: A drip before the dam gives way. Fibromyalgia screws up everything it touches. And nerves reach - well, EVERYTHING.

Attempting to finish a plate of my favorite chicken alfredo earlier this year, I felt a familiar gut twist. The message from my digestive tract came through all too clearly: “We’re done here.”

Within days, the smell of anything chicken turned me nauseous in moments. Turkey’s unique protein composition resisted (thank the universe), but dinner preparation became challenging. Not for me - I don’t cook - but for Tim. (The boy loves his meats)

I sometimes open the fridge and freezer, staring at our stock of plant-based meat. I’m terrified my body will eventually decide it doesn’t want turkey, either.

I’m not built for tofurkey at Thanksgiving.

Produce

Spinach

Broccoli

Cauliflower

Rhubarb

Peppers

Strawberries

Raspberries

Blueberries

Blackberries

Carrots

Celery

Lettuce

Bananas

Zucchini

“Now you know how it feels to give birth.”

Whoever started that joke about kidney stones deserves execution in front of a firing squad. I’ve never given birth (and, courtesy of adenomyosis, fibroid tumors, and endometriosis, never will), but that “small” stone didn’t come close to weighing even as much as a preemie. And I would have sacrificed friends and family to make the pain stop.

Forget anything LARGER.

Afterward, though, I faced the reality of sacrificing my favorite produce items to prevent a repeat performance by my kidneys.

News flash: Everything people swear is healthy contains oxalates - the demon root of the stone that tore a path through my body. People shrugged the list off as “no big deal.”

Except my list of acceptable produce was already down to minimal. My malfunctioning nervous system meant GERD (translate that to the mother of all acid reflux - an acid volcano erupting up to my LARYNX). And while a Nissen fundoplication wrangled the stomach chemistry where it belonged, it removed cruciferous - a more pretentious word for “gas-producing” does not exist - vegetables from my diet.

I joked with my nephrologist that I was down to water, and he rolled his eyes.

It wasn’t far from the truth, though.

Zucchini? Lettuce? Celery? Green-dyed water.

With about as much flavor.

Dairy

Whole milk

2% milk

Skim milk

Greek yogurt

Skyr

Laughing Cow cheese

• Women need calcium to ward off the threat of osteoporosis.

• Calcium binds with oxalates, rendering them inert.

• Adults raised away from the cream-dense milk of a farm lose their ability to digest everything containing milk fats.

• If it didn’t come from a mammal, it’s not milk - I don’t care what the nut industry invests in marketing to say otherwise.

• Greek yogurt stands at the pinnacle of healthy eating.

• Greek yogurt tastes like chalk blitzed in a blender.

• Every other week, chronic pain message boards argue about the necessity of including/avoiding dairy in your diet.

In 2018, I underwent spinal fusion. An orthopedic surgeon opened my back and inserted titanium rods and screws from L4-S1, separating the vertebrae that had decided to compact into a tower. The hardware provided a permanent scaffold for my body to work with.

Because growing bone and even spinal cord tissue as an adult bites.

I’d need YEARS to repair the damage my body wrought over - okay, years. But instead of springing back, good as new, in a few months (the average recovery period for kids), the healing process after 10 equates to a turtle race. And the building blocks of those tissues don’t come from thin air.

Nutrition and weight loss programs argued with me over the inclusion of protein in my diet - in the form of almond milk, cashew milk, grass milk, tree milk, or soy milk. Dairy products were taboo.

I scanned the FDA-required nutrition panels and laughed.

My spine and I would stick with cow-made calcium. And they could pry cheese from my cold-dead fingers.

Grains

Cereal?

Oats?

Flour?

Crackers?

Mixed nuts?

Multigrain bread?

Rice cakes

IBS and fibro walk hand-in-hand into the sunset - BFFs. The failure of the nervous system leads to a failure in digestion. But since no one tests NERVES, gastroenterologists run endoscopes and colonoscopies and shrug their shoulders. Everything looks (wait for it) NORMAL.

No Celiac disease to account for the way my stomach randomly rejects products containing grains. (And no one’s developed a name for a condition that decides it’s Tuesday, so no toast)

But what else made sense for my GI tract’s personality disorder?

Sunday, it happily digested French toast made from the best brioche bread the store had to offer. I didn’t suffer a single moment of nausea throughout the day.

Monday, two bites of Cheerios™ (run-of-the-mill, boring, bland Cheerios™) turned off any interest in food for the next 72 hours. I couldn’t even look at the box without heaving.

Tuesday (because Tim insists on eating food every day, for some reason I fail to comprehend), my stomach allowed my go-to lunch of rice cakes, Laughing Cow cheese, and cherry preserves. (Are rice cakes even a grain? Or nothing more than inflated pieces of bleached cardboard pressed into circular forms?)

Wednesday, I downed half a turkey sandwich with the same brioche bread - DISASTER.

My doctors blinked at my diet logs and suggested I abstain from the foods that bothered me.

On which day, exactly?

Supplements

Turmeric

Pre-natal vitamins

White willow bark

Omegas

Calcium

Vitamin D

MultivitaminBiotin (with collagen)

Melatonin

Better living through chemistry.

There are three cabinets behind the enormous mirror in our bathroom. Two belong to me (and I keep my contacts and thermometer on Tim’s side). The bottles of prescriptions war for space with bottles and containers of supplements. When I go on vacation, I cart around one of the monstrous pill organizers advertised to senior citizens.

Sounds like a deranged rattlesnake.

And I STILL need an extra bag to cart around all the different medical necessities that keep my body functioning as close to normal as it allows. (I’m currently looking for investors for my trendy medical bag carry-on - feel free to contact me if you’re interested)

When friends, family, co-workers, and strangers discover I have chronic pain, they immediately rattle off the newest supplement they spotted on social media feeds.

• Turmeric heals everything!

• White willow bark stops pain!

• Feverfew ends fibromyalgia!

• Omegas halt pain progression!

Asking for medical studies to back the claims results in links to Facebook posts, TikTok videos, and Instagram ads for unlicensed healers. (So nice to live in this day and age) Complete with encouraging nods and unsolicited testimonials.

But my most recent lab work spit out a Vitamin D level under the reported limits. I qualified as a vampire (not the glittery kind). And my pale ass will never absorb enough of the vitamin from the sun, no matter how many hours I spend outside under the hole in the ozone layer. I conceded defeat and added another capsule to my regimen - on top of my multivitamin…and calcium chew. (When my body ditches a vitamin, it goes the whole hog)

And while I protested the trend for years, omegas from plants didn’t turn me against my beloved fish protein. In less cynical moments, I concede they allow me to move better during exercise. But I won’t jump onto any bandwagons and wave a banner that they cured anything or made life with fibro worth living. My nerves still malfunction every day, without fail.

The bright orange capsules are nothing more than a brighter addition to the assortment of white pills I faithfully down every morning.

(If I can’t get much from my watery produce, at least I get a rainbow from my medicine cabinet)

Other

Ice cream

I don’t have a medical degree (not one for humans, at any rate). And I won’t stand on a soapbox and proclaim to have the answers the way plenty of charlatans out there in the chronic pain “business” do.

But when my body is on strike, and I can’t figure out the proper word for a four-legged animal that carried people around the desert in the Old West (“elephant” - definitely “elephant”), nothing makes the world better like ice cream.

Not keto-friendly, low-calorie, sugar-free nonsense, either. Screw the bullshit about sugar being the enemy of invisible illness. (I will go to my grave arguing the opposite when it comes to ice cream) My BODY is the enemy. And in the long war with my stomach, the only thing it has yet to reject is good old reliable Ben & Jerry’s.

Maybe it’s the magic they add - some secret ingredient they’ve yet to identify. Something in those pints (flavor doesn’t matter) switches off the alarm bells in my brain. For a few blissful moments, my body resets to a place of rationality.

And don’t give me any crap about needing “portion control.”

I skip the bowl and grab a spoon.