At least I'm not going backward. I weigh now what I weighed one week ago.

Before that, I was losing, on average, .45 pounds per day. Since the middle of January I've lost 35 pounds. I lost them by increasing exercise and eating healthy food and not eating unhealthy food;  I haven't been trying to restrict calories, but on average I've been eating less than 2000 cal/day.

I still have a long way to go... about 30 pounds before I reach what's considered merely "overweight" instead of "obese."  And I need to lose this weight - due to problems with autoimmune disease, I have a damaged heart muscle.

Here's the problem:  a little over a week ago, for the first time in my life, I got hives.

Not just a couple of hives. Hives covering my thighs from my knees to my belly. After three days I looked as if I'd been horribly abused, and I was starting to have blisters from my jeans rubbing against the hives. I also determined that whatever caused them, it wasn't food. (One benefit of writing everything down as part of my diet is that I was able to test everything I had eaten before the first outbreak.) It's something downstairs in my house, since the hives disappear after a few hours upstairs. It's possible I'm suddenly allergic to my cats, which I've had all my life - that happens sometimes. Sometimes people in middle age suddenly develop severe allergic reactions to things that never bothered them before. Once the new reactions come up, they never go away.

I'm trying various approaches, such as throwing out all my throw rugs and misting the house with Ozium every few hours, which does seem to help but doesn't stop the hives. It's possible that the hives are in response to a combination of my backyard which is literally yellow with pollen, stress, lupus (which causes something like 40% of all hives), and something downstairs.

What stops the hives is antihistamines. I can't take Benadryl constantly because I need to be able to drive a car and I'm not willing to live as a zombie. That means I need a second-gen antihistamine like Claritin. And the Claritin, after 24 hours to get into my system, did stop the hives.

And I have not lost one ounce since I started taking it. I'm working my ass off, biking 6 miles a day and walking half an hour and dancing at least 15 min, I've been eating an average of 1500 cal/day, which is below my basal metabolic rate, and on some days my weight actually goes UP. Part of this is water retention - Claritin is an anti-diuretic - but even accounting for that, I'm not losing weight the way I was before.

After a week of being pissed off and frustrated every time I stepped on a scale, I googled "Claritin and weight gain." I learned two things:  first, the company that makes Claritin says, "Well, if you're having weight gain as a side effect that's probably not the Claritin, it could be a freak reaction involving just you but the odds would be very against it, it's so unlikely..." and everyone else who has ever used it says, "I gained 8 pounds the first month of taking it," "Can Claritin cause weight gain?  Cause I'm eating 1200 cal/day and working out and I'm not losing any weight," and similar things, on and on for hundreds of pages.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Today I'm switching to Zyrtec. But the Zyrtec people are at least honest and admit that Zyrtec causes weight gain. It seems likely to me that since the two work on the same principle, if I'm having weight gain on one I'll have problems with the other. Plus, I'm terrified that the Zyrtec won't work versus the hives.

I just want to go back to two weeks ago when my own house wasn't trying to kill me and working out meant I lost weight.

Oh, and my immune problems are flaring up, which means I have to be very careful working out since my heart is already stressed. But if I waited for the perfect day to exercise, I'd have... well, pretty much what I have now, a fat, out-of-shape body from never working out. 

You know how you're supposed to go to the ER if you ever get a crushing sensation in your chest with pain radiating to your arm and neck?  Yeah. I used to go to the ER. I don't do that anymore. It doesn't accomplish anything except increasing the number of medical bills I have no way of paying. I have pain in my chest every day, and there's nothing to be done about it, because there's no treatment for autoimmune disorders inflamming the lining of my heart. I've had so many EKGs that I can tell the nurse she's forgotten one of the leads.

Am I having a heart attack right now?  Who the fuck knows?  That's the beauty of autoimmune disease. So many things hurt, so much of the time, so many doctors never find a thing wrong. It becomes a game of "Is it an Emergency yet?"  Is this pain and heat in my leg a blood clot, or merely vasculitis?  What about this one in my lung, pleurisy, or pneumonia?   (One time it was pneumonia, but I mistook it for my daily pleurisy until my fever spiked to 103.)

Am I even supposed to exercise?  Well, some authorities say yes, some say no. That whole "See a doctor before starting a new exercise program?"  That's a joke. I live in America. I don't get to see a doctor. I have to use my own judgment based on what I can glean from the internet. And that says exercise may help to stretch the scar tissue inside my heart. Or it may wear out my heart muscle, increase the inflammation, and kill me. Depends, who knows. On the rare occasions when I've been so sick that I've had to pay to see one whether I could afford it or not, I've asked doctors and the doctors don't know.

You know, I have never once, not in my entire life, received treatment from a doctor that actually helped me?

I'm not exaggerating. Even the pneumonia turned out to be viral, so the antibiotics the doctors prescribed were usless. Which didn't prevent them from sending me a 3k bill for an antibiotic drip in the ER.

Not once, not even when I was a child, have I ever received any form of medical care that was an improvement over no medical care at all. I know modern medicine saves lives - my dad would have died without a defibrillator and a heart valve replacement - my mom needed her gallbladder taken out after it ruptured. It's just me. I'm the one who once went to the doctor for a sore throat. "It's probably viral." He sends me home to fight it off. A year later when I visit him for another reason the doctor says, "Oh, that strep, did the antibiotics work?"

What antibiotics?  "Oh, we got your work back and I told my nurse to call in a prescription for you because it was strep."  Yeah. Like the girl who works there has ever passed a message between doctor and patient in her entire life. How can you work with her every day and not know that about her?  Anyway, the strep is gone now, only took two months of my life and possibly was responsible for the severe heart inflammation which the ER said was almost certainly auto-immune related but they lost the blood samples they took so who knows. Thanks for caring.

The only time I've ever gotten any help in a medical setting, it came from a physical therapist. I was there because of severe, constant pain. The doctor, having not so much as looked at me, says (and I quote) "There's nothing on your shoulder that could be causing a problem." Physical therapist?  Runs her hands over me, without even knowing why I was supposed to be there yet, says, "Oh, did you know you've got a mass in your shoulder muscle?  Feels like a trigger point. I bet you're in constant pain."  And presses it hard for 30 seconds. And then advises me how to the same. And that gave me back my life for a while, until my body figured out new ways to fuck up.

I hate my body for being perverse and attacking itself for no good reason and having stupid reactions to the drugs I take to stop it from doing that. Hate  doctors for being useless. Hate America for being a country where it's a moot point that doctors are useless because I can't afford to go to one anyway. And I really hate Claritin right now, almost as much as I hate whatever in my living room is giving me hives.