About the title — each food triggers a slightly different reaction for me. Sugar activates my POTS symptoms, making my heart race and my energy crash. Some greens give me cramps and diarrhea. Cookies, and some ice creams, make me drunk. Not actually, but the eggs make me floppy and goofy, the sugar makes me drowsy, and the chocolate gives me brain fog. Plus, the thrill of eating such a tasty forbidden food makes me giddy! I stumble around giggling and flopping, unable to complete normal sentences or walk in a straight line. My friends call this “cookie drunk.”
Last night, I did some baking. I had run out of diet-approved cookies and oat bars. I try to keep these things stocked in my freezer and bake huge batches to resupply when they run out. So I decided to bake them both in one go. Half the setup and cleanup, right? What could go wrong?
Well, with me, something always goes wrong. First I’ll have trouble standing the whole time. My back will hurt and blood will pool in my feet, causing brain fog, fatigue, and POTS. The brain fog will then cause me to mess up the measurements or make it near impossible to read the recipe. Before my diagnosis and treatment, I couldn't understand the estimated cooking time on recipes -- it took me at least that long to simply read the recipe enough times to make sense out of it, and then following it took three times longer. I have to double or triple check myself each step to make sure I don't screw it up. By the end of this long, grueling process, I’m often so burnt out that I'm likely to drop an egg or break a piece of heirloom china or burn myself (all real, recent scenarios).
Last night, as I realized that I had botched BOTH recipes in ridiculous ways thanks to brain fog, and the clean up required was too much for my fatigue to handle, I started to panic. But as I looked around the kitchen, I just started to laugh. It was so ridiculous, and yet so predictable. And that’s when it hit me — the hilarity of my failed baking experiences are oddly similar to My Drunk Kitchen. This new perspective helped me to stay in good spirits and laugh at it all as I cookie-drunkenly attempted clean up, without being too hard on myself. After all, I can always do the rest in the morning, after I’ve sobered up…
And hey, maybe I should start some goofy YouTube videos of the weirdo predicaments I get myself into while baking. It can be a way to raise awareness about chronic illness!