M*TH**F****R! (WTF is wrong with me? #6)

How many pieces of duct tape does it take to entirely block out all the light from the little LED clock on a microwave?  I am not quite sure but I do know it’s more than two.  I’ll provide an update tomorrow morning.

In other news, it’s raining.  It’s rather lovely if you ask my opinion, although if I could dial-up the temperature just a notch I probably would.  The rain is also a good thing because it means I am still on the couch!  And apparently I am still writing!

You may recall when this whole health crisis went down I started out unraveling WTF is wrong with me? by assuming that the roots were in my Bi-polar disorder.  Blood, saliva, and poop test results revealed something entirely different was going on – that I had Leaky Gut caused by an E.Coli infection which got a grip after 2 large doses of antibiotics – an awesome discovery because we can totally fix it.  But that wasn’t the only thing that is wrong with me.  There’s more!  Turns out my focusing on my Bi-polar in putting the puzzle pieces together was spot on.

This time it wasn’t the blood results that told me WTF is wrong with me?, but they sure did confirm everything.  The answer was in my DNA.  And without sounding dramatic – OH SOD IT – I am going to be totally dramatic: THIS MAKES MY WHOLE LIFE MAKE SENSE.

When the stork delivered my mother’s second bundle of joy at 6:10 am on a sunny Thursday to a modest semi-detached house in Kent, England I came with a side of genetic mutations, which isn’t technically the correct term but we all get the point: some of my genes were in a bit of a pickle.

I am homozygous C677T on the MTHFR gene.  I am also homozygous or heterozygous on some COMT and CBS genes, and there’s some other wrinkles.  These are all genes connected to methylation.

What does this mean?  It means that I have never been able to methylate properly.  Methylation is a process that enables your body to make proteins, utilize antioxidants, and to assist your liver to process fats. It also helps with depression and inflammation.  Methylation results in production of something called SAM-e,  which is anti-inflammatory, supports your immune system, helps produce then breakdown of your brain chemicals serotonin, dopamine and melatonin, and is involved in the growth, repair and maintenance of your cells.  AKA if you are not methylating effectively or enough then you ain’t working right at the cellular level.  The end result of that = chaos.

In my case that {lifelong} chaos has included psoriasis, depression, migraines, IBS, allergies, chemical sensitivities, and more recently Bi-polar disorder.  All the fun things that traditional medicine merely dishes out band-aids for because they insist that they are things which there is no known cure for.  In reality they are just symptoms of an underlying problem.  And to be *really* clear: this is not an assumption, a poor case of cause and effect, or some naturopathic quakery.  If you look at my DNA, those genes are mutated.  My problem is – and always has been – I can’t methylate.

And this is why I say THIS MAKES MY WHOLE LIFE MAKE SENSE.  If I had known this when I was born or before I reached the age of 7 the entire course of my life would have been different.  And I am not being the lest bit dramatic when I say that.

“But you can’t change your genes!” I hear you cry.

Right.  You can’t change a defective gene.  But you can help it do its job better and minimize problems.  Just you wait and see what we’ve been doing about it and what has resulted.  You probably won’t believe it, and you know I don’t think I would either if it weren’t happening to me.

I’ll be writing a lot more about the whys and wherefores of this MoTHerFuckeR MTHFR gene mutation over the next little while forever.

Because this answers everything.  EVERYTHING.