Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Legwork and Life, week of 10/2/19

This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.

"Recovering" is the word for this week.

The DC trip for the Autism Research Program went pretty well.  As in the last couple years, there were a few familiar faces as well as plenty of new ones.  I'll post about the program in more detail in an upcoming Friday post, along with the press release and such.  

The worst part of the trip was the travel, both to and from.  One of my flights home got canceled, in fact, due to nasty thunderstorms.  About the time I found this out, I also misplaced my driver's license, which nearly led to my having a meltdown in the airport.  Fortunately I was able to move myself off to a corner and upend my suitcase until I found it.  Thereafter an airline personnel was able to find me a later set of flights, which got me home about six hours later than I should've gotten home, but at least I did get home.  

Of course, as soon as I got home, my period started.  So I then spent the next couple days miserable, pained, and exhausted.  My brain has flatly refused to work for almost the entire week so far.  I'm really hoping this is temporary, because there's a lot of things I should be doing and haven't been able to.  It's kind of messing with me and making me feel like a failure.  

The histamine situation doesn't have a clear solution.  I'm going to try adding extra vitamin C to my diet.  I guess there's a certain threshold you can normally add before you get unfortunate side effects, and we don't know what mine is right now.  It's possible that I'm not at my vitamin C threshold, and adding more will help my body process all those histamines it's generating, which then make my attempts to exercise miserable.  

It's also possible that I'll need to try a DAO supplement, which is basically the substance your body is supposed to produce to prune down histamines on its own... but some people simply don't produce enough of it, so the histamines build up.  So that might be my problem also.  We simply don't have enough information.  

The vitamin C is the cheapest option, so I'm starting with that and praying it works out.  

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