Boy, what an emotional day!

Let me tell you about a little something called Meniere's disease that has me all messed up.

Meniere's disease is a mystery disease of the inner ear that causes deafness, ringing in the ears, and, at times, vertigo. My husband has it.

You know, a few years ago, as I was experiencing pain, watching loss, realizing that the world is broken, and that I wasn't necessarily immune to something like that happening to me or to the person I love the most in the world, I was preparing myself emotionally for the possibility of something as catastrophic as cancer. Or Alzheimer's. You know, something huge that would affect every area of my life. I spent lots and lots of time emotionally preparing for those kinds of things ever since I started thinking about the words "in sickness and in health."

I wasn't prepared for Meniere's.

One of the things we can do to help Stephen control the effects of Meniere's is have low-sodium diet.

Now let's stop and look at this for a moment.

This is what I grew up eating:
Macaroni & cheese
Tacos
Hamburger Helper
Frozen pizzas
Spaghetti
Lasagna
Fried chicken
Fast food

Sodium in Kraft Macaroni & Cheese: 470 mg (20% DV)
Sodium in Kroger mild taco seasoning: 430 mg (18% DV)
Sodium in Hambuger Helper Cheeseburger Macaroni: 831 mg (34% DV)
Sodium in Freschetta's Hawaiian pizza: 800 mg (33% DV)
Sodium in Classico Tomato & Basil spaghetti sauce: 380 mg (16% DV)
Sodium in Stouffer's lasagna: 671 mg (28% DV)
Sodium in a fried drumstick: 750 mg (31% DV)
Sodium in a McDonald's cheeseburger: 750 mg (31% DV)

(Source: CalorieCount.About.Com)

Keep in mind that those are the amounts in just one serving of said food product.

So, you see that this is a problem.

And Stephen's Meniere's has been getting worse since we first learned about it, I'm pretty sure. And, knowing that our diet is pretty much made up of sodium, I've been feeling worse and worse.

Things came to a head today when we were at the store in front of the frozen pizza section, seconds away from deciding that that would be our dinner for tonight (Sundays are always lazy days for us, cooking-wise). Stephen decided to check the sodium content, since his Meniere's has been terrible lately, and we were shocked. The particular pizza we were looking at contained a whopping 1120 mg of sodium in just one serving.

And I decided then and there that we were never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to eat pizza again.

It'd been coming for a while--this dramatic never, ever, ever, ever, ever decision. I get that way when something worries me for days and days and days and days and I know what the right thing is to do about it, but I don't really want to do the right thing. It gets to a place where the guilt over not doing the right thing is just unbearable and I make a sudden, dramatic decision for the right thing.

So anyway. After that moment in the store I got completely depressed and stayed that way all day, until Stephen finally couldn't take it anymore and we had a big talk outside of Subway (our new dinner idea). He dragged out of me all my pent-up anger and frustration and tears over how I was prepared for anything but Meniere's.

I felt much better after I got all of that out.

It's so irritating, though, how I was so prepared to sacrifice other things, but God is asking me sacrifice the last thing on earth I was prepared to sacrifice!! Like as in my whole entire line of comfort food?! Argh!!

Sigh. I am, as you might be able to tell, still feeling rather dramatic and upset about all this, and at this late hour, I could drag this out ad nauseum without any kind of resolution. Plus I'm too tired to know what kind of resolution there might be to this particular situation. So I'm just going to leave it here and pick it up later. I'm just too tired.

Crying takes everything out of me. :P

-Stephanie

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