Hair and Marmite

Her hair is thinning again, and we couldn't figure out why.  No new foods, toothpastes, skincare, etc.   It took a pair of outside eyes to figure it out, which is why, my friends, it's important to have outside eyes inside your life, painful and embarrassing 'though it may sometimes be.

Outside Eyes: "Isn't there corn in those vitamins?"
Me: "No, those are safe. I've read them."
Outside Eyes: "Are you sure?  There's no way those don't have corn in them."
Me: (suddenly terrified) "I'm sure I read them..."(reading them again)...(quietly whispering expletives)..."Mom, these have corn 4 different ways in them..."(can't look Outside Eyes IN the eyes)

It was an effing B2 vitamin that Emily takes to prevent migraines that has thankfully been working really well.  So when Sasha began been having unexplained stomach aches, I started giving them to her after a thorough checkup and a nod from her doctor.  I thought I read them, I read everything else I give her about 17 times and then twice more for good measure here and there.  But no one's perfect, especially when you get debilitating migraines I guess.  Damn.  Fail, bigtime.  And the shitty part is that they had been working, no more stomach aches, at all.  That is, until she was off them for a few days.  Then she had her first ready-to-puke migraine.  #omg  And of course we have to cut her hair all short and cute again because she's on the verge of another bald spot and has been acting unreasonably beside.  Throwing minor "corn fits" as we call them.

*twitch* Mainly I'm glad that Outside Eyes pointed out that I was slowly poisoning my daughter.  Of course, pick your poison: Have hair, or have abdominal migraines at 4 1/2?  Ugh, not gonna fly.  So I started researching comparable amounts of B2 in foods.  The best source of B2 in food is yeast extract, Marmite, what brits like to spread on toast.  Thankfully I can get it in town and Sasha likes it, although it still isn't the amount of B2 she would get in a vitamin pill.  Outside Eyes stepped in again and just found some straight B2 powder with no additives whatsoever, online for me to order.  It will be here tomorrow.  Hallelujah and shudder.

While I feel like an idiot, I feel like a rescued idiot.  It feels like we came perilously close to disaster, like we live on the edge of a blade.  But really all of life seems perilous or at the very least mind-blowing and amazing.  I am dumbstruck by the mechanisms that keep us alive in our bodies and in the molten center of the earth and in the atmosphere and in the spinning universe.  Who knows how long we'd have gone without noticing the corn in the vitamins, since I was so stuck in my belief that they were safe, and since they were in fact helping Sasha's tummy?  The universe spins tied securely together by gravity and dark energy, and we walk a blade tied securely by love and more love and thankfully sometimes that means other people pointing out my deficiencies and then filling them in.  I hope you have people like that.  I hope you let outside eyes inside your life.  I hope you speak to people like that, painful and embarrassing 'though it may be.  You could save a lot of stuff.  You could keep people from falling, and it's Divine, like the earth spinning.