10:28am July 22, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: Fettucine all'Alfredo

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

dduane:

Among pasta dishes, fettuccine all’Alfredo is possibly unique in the folklore it has gathered around itself. A century along in its development, it’s hard to know for sure whether its success was more due to spontaneous reactions from the people who first ate it, or inspired…

It sounds like in all its incarnations, fetuccine Alfredo is something that would make me very sick. I used to wonder why I felt so terrible after I ate it. Then I was diagnosed with early onset gallbladder disease. And realized the first gallbladder attack I can remember, I was five. Then, I was diagnosed with gastroparesis. Both of them make processing fat very difficult.

I love both versions, but my body seems to like a lot of fat. (And I agree that the original, just lots of butter and cheese version, sounds like “more the kind of thing that a tired mom would plunk down in front of the kids at the end of the day". Not a lot of innovation involved there, tasty as it can be.) This kind of thing is one of the reasons I get irritated at the popularity of one-size-fits-all “healthy" eating advice. Everybody’s system handles things differently. I actually made myself desperately sick with a very low fat veg*n approach. (And not just from unrecognized celiac and the amount of wheat involved there.) Everybody’s mileage is going to vary.

It sounds like a good thing that your gallbladder problems eventually got recognized, no older than you are still. I almost hesitate to jinx myself saying it, but I’ve been lucky with that so far. My mom started showing symptoms in her 20s, which got brushed off and psychosomatized for at least 15 years because she did not fit the “fat, fair, and forty" profiling common then: actually no part of that, when her problems started. (And I hope that sterotype is not still as big a problem.) They finally thought to check for gallstones when things got so thoroughly blocked up that she wound up in the hospital and almost died from it. There were enough huge stones by then that the gallbladder was apparently stretched to several times the expected size.

ETA: That is another thing where I have to wonder if they get cause and effect mixed up. Because I wouldn’t be surprised if getting your system fouled up by gallbladder problems might help you gain weight, as a symptom. /ETA

Come to find out, young Native women are actually the group at highest risk. Because we secrete high levels of cholesterol in bile. Our family also tends toward high bilirubin levels—apparently an NDN thing back home, which at least some clueful doctors recognize and don’t automatically decide you must be drinking yourself to death when your liver panels come back “funny" in multiple ways!—and the cholesterol will form stones around specks of bilirubin like pearls in an oyster. I still watch out for symptoms, being at pretty high risk, but yeah. She could actually stop eating such a low-fat diet without getting sick, after finally getting it removed, but that also varies a lot between people.

My family has a long history of women getting their gallbladder out in their early twenties or late teens.

I was asking about symptoms when I was 18, but nobody listened until I became totally unable to function at age 22ish, by which time my gallbladder had already died a long time ago. Like it wasn’t even functioning by then. My surgeon sent a furious letter to the GI specialist I had seen, who didn’t even examine me, pronounced me fat and lazy, and literally stormed out of the room and slammed the door in my face when I said none of his explanations fit my symptoms.

My regular doctor only had me tested as an afterthought. She found it very unlikely because I didn’t visibly react when she pressed on my gallbladder. But I was in so much pain by then that I could barely communicate or function. Not much longer and I could’ve died. A staff person made me see my doctor. Even though I thought since we ruled out diabetes she wouldn’t find anything. (People had noticed I got sick after eating sugary foods…which also happened to be fatty.)

A friend also treated me like shit for having to lie down in a sidewalk for 45 minutes after eating fatty Swedish food and then going on an amusement park ride that rattled my gallstones up and down.

She later apologized. Said “I didn’t know you were really sick.“ Oh, so HEALTHY PEOPLE HAVE TO LIE ON THEIR BACK IN PUBLIC FOR NEARLY AN HOUR JUST TO GET IN A CAR?

I mean did she think I did that for fun? Why would a friend need a concrete explanation in that scenario to know something was wrong?

But I literally can’t remember an age where I could process fat without feeling really sick. Whether it was shortbread or donuts or fetuccine Alfredo, I always paid for it.

Oh the reason I continued having problems is called post cholecystectomy syndrome.

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