Today after noon, I accidentally ate too many filled chocolates. Oh, I had bought and paid for them, and I am not overweight. The problem is, I react very badly to fat. If I eat more than small amounts within a 6 hour period, I usually get a horrifying illness between 24 and 48 hours later. The symptoms seem more neurological than anything. Before it starts, body temperature goes down slightly (no more than 1 degree Celsius below normal) and I tend to feel sluggish. When the attack starts, I begin feeling an intense cold coming from within. My body gets stiff and begins shivering, then shaking. Spasms of the colon and to a lesser degree stomach and bladder keep me near the bathroom. The third symptom is a steadily growing sense of fear. Sometimes the cold comes after one of the two others, but this is the most common order: Cold, spasms and fear. This is followed by a rapid decline in cognitive abilities – in simpler words, I become much dumber. I would estimate that my IQ falls to half. Finally, the cold loses its grip, I become extremely sleepy and fall into dreamless sleep whether I want to or not, even if sitting in a chair. When I wake up, I am fine, except that my digestion is upset for up to a day afterwards. Well, so far I have woken up every time. It does not necessarily seem certain at the time.

As for how much fat I can eat, it depends in part on what form it takes, but more on the absolute quantity. 6 pieces of these filled chocolates is fine, if I don’t eat anything else with fat in it for a couple hours before or after. 8 may also work. But today I ate something like 10-12, which is almost certainly plenty enough to trigger a full attack. (Half-attacks, less serious and shorter of duration, can occur when my fat intake is right on the border of what I can tolerate.)

There is only one thing I know that can stop an attack once the fat is past the stomach: Heat, lots of heat. If the room is hotter than my skin, and I shiver and shake as much as I can during the first phase, I may heat up my body enough to make the rest of the attack milder. I have also never had an attack during exercise after I warmed up and up to an hour or so at least after. This may be misleading though since I am so sluggish before the onset of the attack, I am more likely to take a nap than exercise.

I am considering trying to start light exercise around noon tomorrow, wearing heavy clothes, and keep exercising on and off until nightfall, never cooling down. But that is not very realistic, knowing myself. Most likely I will be taken by surprise again and have a very scary episode.

I have the more acute throat thing again that I have from time to time, where it feels like there is some kind of particles on my vocal cords that I just can’t get off. I cough and harrumph, I drink water and yogurt, but I can still feel it, as if I had inhaled some kind of coarse powder and it settled on my vocal cords. In some extreme cases in the past, my vocal cords reacted by locking up completely so I could not breathe in or out for about half a minute. Those were among the most scary moments in my life. Usually that happens right at the onset, though. Obviously they unlocked each time, or I would not be here to write about it.  But will that happen every time?

This is episodic, not chronic like the soreness when I speak more than a few paragraphs in one day. But it is the same part of the body, so the specialist should have noticed if there were any irregularities of the vocal cords when I was there a couple years ago. They looked OK, he said, except for being red. No polyps or other deformities. So it is probably not related to that. But I have no idea what it is. This time it came shortly after eating my favorite ice cream. I have never had any allergic reactions to it, and I doubt allergy would give these symptoms anyway. Even so, the episodes are so bad, I tend to never again eat whatever it was I ate shortly before they happen. That’s a fairly long list now, since these episodes have been scattered across several years.