When we last left off, I, Ms. Lab Rat, was sniffing the sickly scent of powdered sugar as I passed the by-now stale gingerbread houses on display in the secular cathedral that is the NIH (National Institutes of Health.) I had time to kill before my Phlebotomy appointment, so I took the elevator to the second floor cafeteria, which has an excellent salad bar. And discovered I was too early for salad.

Here’s the deal with my new Wahls-inspired MS diet: the foods I used to associate with breakfast are off the menu. No processed foods, no gluten, no grains, no milk (bye bye breakfast cereals,) no eggs, no cheese (bye bye omelets.)

Here is a picture of what breakfast looked like for me today: 

You’re looking at bok choy and garlic escargot simmered in homemade chicken broth, topped with kimchi and dulce. The Wahls Diet calls for the consumption of four servings of leafy green veggies a day, at least four servings of colorful fruits and veggies, a meat, a touch of seaweed, a bit of something pickled. The Wahls Diet is also very very big on homemade bone broth. So this breakfast covers pretty much all the bases. (If I were a true purest, there would have been a little knob of organ meat floating around in the bowl, too. But that’s the thing about the Wahls diet. Or maybe any diet? You can always feel you’re not quite up to par.) This breakfast was yummy, by the way. But this kind of breakfast is not easily obtained on the road. Not even in a hospital. (By the way, what’s up with hospital food? Why are there so many unhealthy choices? Topic for another blog.)

Here’s a fuller, indeed cluttered picture of what breakfast looked like for me today, when I tell the whole complicated story of my MS maintenance:

You are still looking at my pretty bowl of healthier-than-thou breakfast food. You are also looking at the supplements required for the clinical trial of the Wahls Diet:

5,000 IU Vitamin D3, 1 t cod liver oil, 5000 liquid vitamin B12, 1 mg folate, multi-vitamin.

Then there’s all the stuff I have to take for my funny bladder:

AZO, macrobid, and some other antibiotic I’ll be finished with at dinner.

Then all the stuff I choose to take for my self-designed Ms Lab Rat trial:

3x 100 mg Biotin (which I am hoping will eventually fix my bladder problems and get rid of three of the items above), 500 mg Hemp oil, local hemp oil, glorious hemp oil (which has helped me sleep and dream after many sleepscarce, dreamless years), 5 mg Lithium (which I thought was doing a fine job as a mood stabilizer, though I just learned that what I take isn’t anything like a mood stabilizing dose. So let’s call it my placebo.)

This is a lot to keep track of. When I graduated from the Swank Vs. Wahls clinical trial, I got a certificate (no joke) and a private viewing of a 20 minute video of Dr. Wahls that just served to delay the seven hour drive ahead of me. No t-shirt. The only remotely useful thing I left with was a booklet to help me keep up with all the details of living in a Wahls Diet world. (I had rallied hard for an app, but there isn’t one. Yet.)  For a few weeks afterward, I kept filling in little circles every time I popped another supplement, or finished another serving of leafy greens. But eventually I ditched the booklet. I want to feel a little less obsessive, a little less persnickety. Either that, or I’d already assimilated all the expectations. My brain had become the diet app I’d been asking for.

The morning of my TRAP trial, I realized I was not going to get a Wahls breakfast, or Wahls-ish breakfast before my blood draw. I guzzled a “green” drink I purchased from a vending machine and took the elevator down to Phlebotomy. A lovely woman handed me a white stub with a number. As I glanced down to read 32, she called, “Thirty two.” It was the Christmas holiday. I was the only patient in the waiting room. I filed past untouched trays of cookies and two pots of coffee and entered the orderly hive of numbered white cubicles, wondering if I’d recognize my phlebotomist. I had been there many times before.