Coconut!

This past week has been dedicated to trialing coconut in Ellie's diet and I am super excited to say it passed with flying colors! Horray!

I can't believe it's been since June that we last trialed coconut. It didn't go well. For a long time we thought Ellie was sensitive to or allergic to coconut but through a looooong discovery process we realized she wasn't able to digest foods high in saturated fat.

Things have been crazy since then and it just was never the right time to try something so risky. But Ellie's been doing great and we decided to take the plunge.

Working without a diagnosis

We took Ellie in for an abdominal ultrasound and to get some bloodwork done on Monday to look into the theory that she is having some type of problem with her liver, gallbladder or pancreas. The only other experience I've had with an ultrasound was the one I had when I was pregnant with Ellie, in which the ultrasound tech explained what we were looking at and was generally a wealth of information. So I was surprised and frustrated when the tech on Monday wouldn't tell us a thing. She said they'd write up a report and send it to Ellie's doc and only then could I find out the results. Well that took 2 days and the waiting drove me up the wall. Finally I got this email today from her doc:

Getting closer to the answer?

In the past week we have been thinking and learning a lot about fats and fat digestion and it feels like we may be inching closer to figuring out what is going wrong with Ellie's digestion. Several times in the past week I've actually uttered the phrase "what if this is the last piece of the puzzle!?!"

Over the course of months it's become apparent that Ellie cannot tolerate saturated fats. The foods she has reacted worst to are very high in saturated fat: ghee, coconut oil, beef, tallow, cacao butter and eggs. A couple of weeks ago I trialed cacao butter in my diet and it was immediately apparent it was a problem. Ellie suddenly wouldn't go down for bed, telling us her tummy hurt and having the jerky cramping abdomen during sad awakenings overnight. I had thought duck eggs were fine, but Ellie hadn't been doing well for about a month and so three days ago I pulled the duck eggs and suddenly she was a different person. The last two nights she's slept nearly 12 hours in a row! Hallelujah.