Stupid carrots again....

 So I am feeling mostly better, though it freaked me out A LOT when the doctor's office called yesterday and said "there was no evidence of bacterial growth from your sample, just keep drinking lots of water, discontinue the AZO because it's making you ill*")

(*GI symptoms, plus, I really need to avoid sodium salicylate, which is in it)

And yeah, again for part of yesterday I had *terrible* anxiety: couldn't concentrate on things, couldn't even really play the piano. My brain kept going "holy crap you're probably dying, you probably have some previously-undetected cancer that's eating away at you and it'll be diagnosed eventually but it'll either be Too Late or you'll be facing years of horrific operations and chemo, and have a shortened life"

I was having heartburn, which can be symptomatic of several very bad things, and also, it's how my friend Del started with the cancer that ultimately took *his* life. So I have some stuff going on in  my brain.

Nevermind that my primary cancer risk factor (skin cancer) would not be involved here. Never mind that I have had no relatives with the main ones I was worrying about, nor have I ever smoked (which is a risk factor for many, many cancers). I have this problem when I'm anxious like that, I get an idée fixe about things and have a VERY hard time shaking it.

I was hurting, and I figured, Heck, at this point, pain relief is probably all I've got. So I took a couple tylenol - about 20 minutes later I felt calmer, and I looked up "is tylenol anxiolytic" and there are a few, weak studies suggesting maybe? So I don't know.

Then I thought: Hm, those new gummi vitamin D I've been taking, they were a different brand, could they possibly have an artificial sugar in them? (Most artificial sugars are bad for me - give me migraines, or give bad digestive upset). So I looked at the bottle.

WOMP WOMP: "Colored with purple carrot juice extract"

Oh you have got to be kidding me.

Carrots are one of my food sensitivities, and in the past, purple carrot juice was the worst one. Though normally it just caused GI upset? Maybe it's what caused the indigestion though (it's much better this morning, I did NOT take my dose of vitamin D today) and I SUPPOSE it could have also irritated, uh, other parts of my body and made me THINK I was having a UTI? I tend to get sort of systemic reactions to these things - had had a few more hives this week but didn't think much of it, other than "yeah my whole body is shutting down on me now" but I also wonder if the horrific anxiety was tied to some kind of weird allergic reaction. (It's also been an uncommonly bad spring for pollen, and I'm already really allergied out, and often these kinds of things are worse - carrots cross react with birch and mugwort pollen and while I don't think we have birch here, we might have mugwort, or a close relative. Though it's probably a BIT early for it to be flowering...)

At any rate: I feel better. Not 100%, but definitely better than yesterday and much better than earlier in the week. I'm still going to do the "well-woman checkup" and I hope I'm not wrong, that I still qualify as a "well woman" and there's nothing else going on there. But at least I don't feel like the infrastructure is crashing and burning like I did earlier this week.

A friend has spoken for the (opened) bottle of gummi vitamins, so at least they won't go to waste. I may just have to start using the boring tablets - there is one brand of vitamin D gummis that don't have the carrot juice but I can't always find them, and that's why I bought these.