[Clodfobble]

Gawd, the fun just never stops around here.

We had a follow-up with the nutritionist to discuss his staggering allergy results. She confirmed that yes, that number of very-strongly-rated intolerances is unusual, even for an autistic kid. She also had me go all the way back through his food/behavior logs with her to be sure: a lot of these are definitely new sensitivities within the last couple of months. He used to eat peanut granola bars all the freaking time without a problem, then they slowly started causing more and more of a reaction until now they are an instant ticket to diarrhea and poor behavior.

What this means is that his digestive tract is so damaged that going GFCF, while helpful, has not been enough to allow it to heal on its own. His stools got better when we forced him onto all new foods, but they gradually got worse again as these new foods leaked through his damaged intestines into his bloodstream, where the immune system said, "WTF, GTFO!" and started attacking it, thus developing a sensitivity to this new food. Every time we put food into his system, we run a significant risk of developing a sensitivity to it, and the only solution right now is a strict rotation diet, where he does not eat a food more often than once every 4 days.

So each day gets its own grain, protein, etc. I'm still hammering out the details around what he will and will not eat, but the bare bones look something like this:

Day 1 - Chickpea flour, Turkey - His current waffles and sandwich bread are chickpea flour, so this is pretty much his daily diet right here already. Waffles for breakfast, turkey sandwich for lunch... and probably a turkey sandwich for dinner until I can get better ideas.

Day 2 - Amaranth flour, Chicken - The pumpkin bars I alluded to in another thread were a test run with amaranth flour, to see if he could taste it (it's one of the yuckier flours, and he already rejected amaranth waffles long ago.) He couldn't. So that's a pumpkin bar for breakfast, chicken nuggets breaded with Lay's potato chips for lunch... and chicken nuggets for dinner until I can get better ideas.

Day 3 - Corn, Sunflower - Sunflower is the only nut that he doesn't have a severe problem with yet, but he's more likely to eat that than beef, so we'll start here for now. Corn is super easy, with tons of snacks like Fritos, Tings, tortilla chips, Kix cereal, Chex cereal, popcorn, etc. My next "bar" attempt is going to be a sunflower butter (like fake peanut butter) bar. We'll see how that works out...

Day 4 - Sorghum Flour, Pork - I made a new loaf of sandwich bread last night with sorghum flour, so we'll see if he is willing to have ham sandwiches on it. I could in theory blend it with tapioca flour to mitigate the taste, but tapioca flour is already in his chickpea flour bread. Maybe potato flour. Oh, but potatoes are in the breading of his chicken nuggets on day 2 (of course it's a theoretical breading I haven't tried yet, so maybe he won't like it anyway.) At least he can have bacon on these days. I'll just feed him bacon all day long.


But believe it or not, the above is actually the preferable solution. Given his ongoing problems, at this point we've earned ourselves a side trip to the gastroenterologist, and I've been reading up on the messageboards about the common procedures and treatments others have had to do. I have learned they will likely do a pill cam procedure, which will take pictures as it travels all the way through him and tell us exactly what parts are damaged and how. Small intestine damage is treated with different meds than large intestine, inflammation is treated with different meds than infection, Crohn's disease gets its own special protocol, etc. So that would be a relatively easy thing. The nightmare scenario is they tell me he is just too damaged to heal on his own, even with medications, and that he has to do a stint on the elemental diet; i.e., nothing but liquid fortified with amino acids and vitamins all pre-broken-down, the same sort of thing they give to coma patients through a feeding tube, so his digestive system has a chance to be totally left alone for awhile.

Make him eat nothing but liquids for some length of time? Well okay, I have the resolve to do that, if I have to. Hell, it'll be easier than trying to come up with real food he can eat. But try to send him to school while he's doing this? Let him spend every snack time and lunch period sitting in the nurse's office? I just don't know. Maybe he'll just take a few weeks off, unless they tell us we have to do this thing for months... But hey, maybe we'll get lucky and the rotation diet plus meds will be enough, right? Gotta think positive.