A Dream with a Date: October 1st, 2024

Early in 2024, I developed severe health problems. Doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I was very sick. I had no appetite and felt ill daily. I spent a worrying amount of time in the washroom, I had moderate to severe abdominal pain, and my exhaustion level was intense. It didn’t matter what I ate or if I ate. There was no rhyme or apparent reason why I felt this way.

My parents were taking it quite hard as I am their only remaining child, and suffering another loss like that would be too much. I was in such a bad way for so long that I spent most of my time struggling to do anything. My primary care physician (PCP) tried everything he could think of, but eventually, he had to direct me to a gastroenterologist.

It seems so silly to me now, knowing that all it would have taken was a blood test, that my PCP didn’t order a celiac panel. It was the first thing the gastroenterologist did, and mine came back off the charts. My numbers were so high they didn’t even measure them past that point.

Most people diagnosed with celiac will know that the next thing ordered by the gastroenterologist was an endoscopy and biopsy of my small intestines. These procedures would confirm my celiac and measure the amount of damage done to my body. The damage was almost as bad as it can be. 

If you aren’t aware of what celiac is, the short of it is: it’s an autoimmune disease where, if I eat gluten, my immune system attacks me. Not to be confused with an allergy, there is no treatment for celiac, only management. I avoid gluten for the rest of my life, or I go back to feeling like death. If I continue to eat gluten, despite how I’m feeling, it will be a lottery as to whether the malnutrition kills me or if I develop intestinal cancer that kills me.

This description sounds dramatic, but I have a severe case. It is a genetic condition that I could have carried the rest of my life without it ever being active or doing me harm. A multitude of things can cause its development. One of them that I had experienced much of in the preceding years was stress.

Another thing complicated by celiac disease is that your immune system is so busy attacking your body that it doesn’t protect you from the things you need it for, like colds, cases of flu, and coronavirus. I discovered this the hard way when a coworker came to work sick. He was over the cold in a matter of a few days. I could not get out of bed for an entire week except to get something to drink or go to the bathroom; it was that hard on me.

If the diagnosis wasn’t difficult enough for my family and me, the realization that a viral or bacterial infection could potentially land me in the hospital was a step too far. I felt like I was reliving COVID 2020 all over again. I wore masks when I left the house. I even wore disposable gloves at work because the amount of handwashing and sanitizer I used destroyed my skin.

The doctor informed me that if I avoided all gluten, my numbers would take six months to a year to come down. My immune system would take another six months to a year to stop attacking me. Only after both of those things normalized would my body begin to heal.

Knowing the environment I worked in through 2020 and how most of my coworkers handled it, I felt extremely unsafe in the office. The stress of this situation on my family and me was too much.

I wrote a new date on my notebook: October 1st, 2024. This became the date we would be moved into my parents' home, eight hours from our home at the time, and it became my new goal to work toward. I took the same approach as I did with 2023: notebook, lists, and determination, though this time, I was more nervous about failure.

We broke down the steps into minor details and made them happen—one tiny step at a time. This time, we reached our target early. By mid-September, we had moved and were officially living with my family.

I cannot tell you the peace and comfort it gave me to work from home in a place filled with love and support. Wonder of wonders, our new community has a higher rate of celiac disease than is typical. Because so many in the area have celiac, grocery stores have a much wider variety of gluten-free foods. I also haven’t encountered the stigma that I did where we used to live. 

Some people viewed me as they would an “almond mom.” (1) It felt as though they didn’t see what I was going through as truly dangerous to my health. One went so far as to tell me, “It’s not like you’re doing to die.” The possibility of dying felt very real to us.

1. From dictionary.com - “An almond mom is a parent who follows incredibly strict or dangerously unhealthy eating habits and attempts to force them on their children.

The term almond mom is most often applied to mothers or female caregivers, but the term could apply to any person with a very strict or dangerous diet that they want to force onto their children.

An almond mom’s diet is typically strict to the point of extreme, such as only allowing for small portions of foods low in calories. An almond mom may also approve of eating disorders or unsafe eating habits that are dangerous to a person’s health in the pursuit of maintaining a low weight.”