On Hope, Lost and Found..

I wear two silver rings on the pinky finger of my left hand; one says "Faith", the other says "Hope". I have only had these rings for a short while, but being able to look down on my hand and seeing these words jump out at me has carried me through some bad moments.

This Saturday, I lost 'Hope". And not just the ring....

Salamander has been having a rough time with the whole bloated belly situation, and I ran out of ideas, things to try to make it better for him. The only thing left to try was to stop the majority of the natural agents he was taking to address the gut dysbiosis situation; the theory here being that the amount of die-off and detox these supplements are triggering are just too much for his poor inflamed bowels to handle.

I don't like to stop an intervention once I've started it. In the past, stopping (or temporary suspending) never worked out well for Salamander. It's like "once you hit the Rapids, you can't turn back.. all you can do is keep paddling."

But this bloating thing was really starting to worry me....

So Saturday nite, I stopped all *gut bug hunt* supplements, except for three basic ones that he has been taking for years. He also only took the basic ones yesterday.


This morning his belly was markedly flatter. He also wasn't stuffing his food like he had been doing over the past week or so (for Salamander, stuffing food can be an attempt to address gut pain). And I got an email that my ring has been found.


Hope.
Lost, and Found...

[I'll fix the pic when I have a moment..]