The Plan

I have a wonderful husband.  Once he got home we talked about this all and came up with a plan.

As I started looking at a low salicylate diet I compared it to the low histamine diet that I had been following and discovered that spinach is not technically allowed.  I started consuming it at the end of low histamine week two and ate it regularly after that point.  If you recall, week three was rough and week four was awful. Since we have no idea why things went south so fast, it is possible that spinach was the culprit.  Wouldn't it be lovely to know?

The biggest question we want to answer is if we can return to the improvement I had during the first two weeks of the low histamine diet.  Back then hives were not occurring, I could leave my house and I was not having asthma attacks. That first week wheat and ice cream seemed to make me sick so I will start the diet out leaving out those two low histamine items.  Sunflower seeds will also stay out because they gave me hives.

I have allowed high histamine food in over the last 24 hours and maybe felt a bit worse (now that I feel pretty bad all the time I can't really tell if that food made things worse).  I ate a piece of homemade bread just a little while ago, however, and the rash started to come back right away on my hands.  Yeast, therefore, might be a significant issue for me.  Yeast produces a lot of histamine as it grows but it is also possible that I am just sensitive to yeast.  In the past I have struggled with yeast overgrowth in many ways.

If I do well back on the base low histamine diet, we will start pursuing a transition to a high nutrient diet at a much more cautious rate.  I'll borrow from the advice for introducing new food to babies (a new food every three days).  I am hopeful that I will be able to tell if anything is different quickly but will still wait the full three days before trying another food.

If returning to the base low histamine diet does not diminish these new symptoms, we'll likely forgo a diet change at this point and pursue traditional medical care...maybe with new medical providers.  Once I am under control again we'll look to implementing a high nutrient diet or trying a low histamine and low salicylate diet hybrid.  If I do respond well to the removal of high salicylate foods aspirin desensitization will likely be very beneficial to me in the future.