Riding the waves

If there’s any one certain conclusion I can make after tracking my craters of unholy pain, it’s this.

RAS comes in waves.

Cowabunga.

I have on cycles, and I have off cycles.  When I’m “on”, any kind of scratch in my mouth or exposure to any kind of acid – citrus, battery, or otherwise – will bring out an ulcer.  Sometimes many ulcers.  They all spring up at the same time, in various different places.

Then I have off cycles, when all of these ulcers will disappear at the same time.  Then, when I’m “off”, I could get a tattoo of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man inside my mouth and nothing will happen.

So why is it that sometimes anything at all could bring them on and sometimes nothing at all?

This is when I began to turn away from the idea that it’s all about diet.  There’s something systemic going on here.  There’s some kind of trigger that’s affecting the whole mouth.  Is it hormones?  is it deficiencies?  I’ve always wanted to get a blood test to find out.

The first time around tracking, I found it to be about 10 days.  10 days on, 10 days off.  This time around as I’ve been tracking, I’ve unfortunately found that the days off are less and less.  Sometimes it seems like one ulcer heals up and the next day a new one is forming.  But I still never get any overlap.  I never see one heal while another one goes on.  It’s all or nothing.  One cycle ends, another begins.

What it is that’s causing this is now the big question.  I have a feeling whatever is the trigger that brings about an ulceration and the followup inflammation, if you control that, you control RAS for good.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Let me hear from you!  Do you see the same thing happening to you?  Let me know in the comments.

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