Terrible quiche is a tragic thing. I blame it on my stomach.
Going gluten-free hasn't been easy. I have no plansto make this a blog about gluten-free food, although suddenly that's exactly what my meals are all about. I've always eaten everything, and abstinence is not my forte.
When I quit smoking in grad school, it wasn't primarily for health reasons. (♪♫ la la la ♫♪ . . . stick with me) In fact, it probably would have been better for my mental stability to have continued to smoke. The problem was that I had this terrible headache. That lasted for five months. This was a mother of a headache — it was the Grendel's mother of a headache. It was there when I woke up, insistently tapping on the wrong side of my skull, and then slowly and with increasing fury, it would pound away behind my eyes, trying to escape in the hopes that it could punch me a few times from the outside, too.
By 8 p.m., the most I could do was lie on the floor of my awful one-room hovel in Charlottesville and moan quietly. I was told that if I stopped smoking and drinking coffee, the headache would go away. I thought dropping out of grad school might be more effective, but the doctor insisted that I humor him.
So I did, because I was desperate. And my headache went away. I waited for it to come back so that I could start smoking again, but it was gone, baby, gone. Which kind of pissed me off.I almost lost my mind without a cigarette — it wasn't one-day-at-a-time but five-minutes-at-a-time. For weeks. When the headache made a brief reappearance, I'd decided that because quitting smoking was so insanely hard, I wasn't ever going to do it again. I still don't smoke, although every once in a while, sweet friends, I still want a cigarette.
(more after the jump)
The gluten thing is the same — only, of course, entirely different. I wasn't in constant pain, I just felt kind of crappy. There was bloating, plus a few more unpleasant symptoms — I don't want to get into that. But I wasn't in pain like I was during grad school, I just had the persistant feeling that aging had suddenly signed me up for the black diamond mogul run instead of the slow swoosh-swoosh of the bunny trail.
Upon the advice of my celiac sister, I kicked the gluten. And yet, and YET, like a schizophrenic who thinks they don't need their meds because they feel so much better, I would cheat. A burger here, a piece of pizza there. A bowl of pasta ... WAIT. WHAT THE HELL WHY AM I WRITHING WITH STOMACH CRAMPS I THINK I MUST HAVE A TERRIBLE STOMACH BUG BUT WHY DOESN'T ANYONE ELSE IN MY FAMILY HAVE THIS?
Gluten. Fuck.
(To be continued, tomorrow . . .)
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