Feeling Icky

As I've mentioned, I've been doing green smoothies for a little while now, and feeling better.  The last two days, however, I've had less smoothie, and more cooked food.  Ugh.  It wasn't even anything particularly junky.  I can just tell that my tolerance for cooked food is going down.  Didn't sleep too well last night, and had a lot of chest pain yesterday. 

In fact, the chest pain was bad enough that I considered going to the hospital.  I had surgery about 14 months ago, to repair an ascending aortic aneurysm and had my aortic valve replaced.  These pains are similar to the pains I felt in the heart area during healing.  It is interesting to note that while I waffled on raw during my recovery from heart surgery, I noticed a very significant decrease in pain while raw, and a definite increase in pain when I went off raw.  I had been pain free throughout the fall and winter, but the last few months some of the pain is coming back.  Not sure if it's because of my diet (quite likely) or possibly because there are problems with the valve.  Sometimes people, particularly younger women like me, can end up with the valve not fitting right as little as a year out from surgery.  So when the pain hit yesterday, I was really worried.

I decided if the pain continued or got any worse, I'd go to the hospital.  It actually went away at that point, so I took a nap.  I woke up feeling better, and have had only a few slight pains today.  I did have an episode of vertigo again today, which is something that I've had, increasingly, over the last year.  I'm not sure of the cause.  I had an MRI done of my head and neck, to check for a brain aneurysm, as I have a connective tissue disease, Bicuspid Aortic Valve Disease, which makes me prone to aneurysms in other locations in my body as well as the aortic aneurysm I already had repaired.  The tests showed no aneurysms, although that doesn't exactly make me feel better, as I know someone with my symptoms who had the same negative results...only to nearly die from a ruptured brain aneurysm three years later. 

Based on my previous experience healing myself on raw, I'm suspecting I have some health issues (whatever they are) that my body is starting to heal while I'm on my green smoothies.  Now that I'm getting live enzymes in my food, my own body's enzymes are being called back to the job they were meant to do: heal my body.  But when I slow or stop the smoothies, they stop healing and run back to digesting my food for me, and I end up with pain and symptoms coming back with a vengeance.  This is something I know has happened in the past, when pregnant--all the back pain, gestational diabetes, and other pregnancy-related difficulties I had disappeared when on raw, but came back quickly when I went off...and if I had sugar?  Yikes!  It got really bad, really fast.

So what do I do now?  Well, I think it's time to face facts.  I have some problems that need to be addressed.  I can play around doing half raw and half cooked, and never heal completely, or I can go all terminator-style on my health problems and eliminate them by going all raw. 

Guess which one I'm going to pick?

It's not a big deal anyway, as I've noticed that I'm just not enjoying any cooked food anymore like I used to.  I'm really loving the healthy raw stuff.  That just goes to show you how powerful consuming greens really is--just replacing two meals a day (sometimes only one) with green smoothies has completely changed what kinds of foods I want, and the choices I make.  Incredible, isn't it?