Melissa Writes

I’m looking for local Topeka restaurants that have gluten-free menus.  I’m setting up a seperate site that will be dedicated to those places.  If you’ve got one or know of a place that does, this will be great free advertising.  The website will be ready in 3 days and will be glutenfreetopeka.com.

Well, well, well I haven’t been writing weekly like I wanted to.  It’s been an odd summer.  Let me get you caught up quickly.

I bought a gluten-free bread book a couple weeks ago.  I’ve read it cover to cover twice.  I’m now ready to make the leap and buy a bread maker, something I swore I’d never do when I baked with wheat.  I’ve made cinnamon rolls from the book.  I was not thrilled.  The bread portion wasn’t bad, they just didn’t have the cinnamon flavor I was looking for.  I’ve got a few ideas bouncing around on how to fix it.  When I get it right, I’ll post pictures.  I’m not showing things that don’t look good.  Amazing part of them, the butter soaked in.  That’s right the butter soaked into the bread.  If you’ve been in the gluten-free world for awhile you’ll know what an exciting thing that is.  If not, butter used to roll right off the bread.  You make them in muffin cups, I made the 12-cup version, but my 12-cup muffin tins must be slightly smaller than the recipe author’s.  They went over the top of the pan and were a pain to get out.  I’m going to attempt french bread later this week.  Maybe it will be picture worthy.

My summer addiction came back on TV this past week.  That’s right I am a Big Brother addict.  I don’t know if there is a support group for it or not, but even if there was I wouldn’t want to join.  I enjoy my addiction too much to give it up.  I’m not thrilled that Jesse is back on the show, but I am thrilled that this group of house guests are the craziest I’ve seen so far.  In the short two weeks that they have been in the house we’ve had fights, racial slurs, possible love/sex triangles, and already at least one sexual act under the covers.  It blows me away.  I look forward to the upcoming weeks of watching the show on TV, live feeds, and chatting away at hamsterwatch.com.

Crafting yes that’s a sad face after the word crafting.  I love crafting but I’m running out of room in the house, I need some place to set up my stuff.  I’m attempting to make a quilt, I’ve done it before, the attempt comes in trying to use the kitchen table.  I get the table cleared, set-up my stuff, get a few strips or blocks cut and it’s time to do something else.  When I finally get back to the quilt, the table is covered, my stuff is buried and I’m irked.  I did knit the other night during the commercial breaks of Big Brother.  I’m going to attempt to do that every week during at least one show.  Class will be starting back up and I’ll still be working on the same project I was when class stopped.  I also want to sew some reusable bags for grocery shopping, I’ve got crochet patterns for them but I think I could sew them quicker.

Nascar is starting to irk me.  Why?  Well you’ve got teams wooing Danica for money not talent, a judge over turning Mayfield’s suspension who hasn’t attempted to make the field since, and Kyle Busch acting like he is three I’ve about to give up.  Come on, you can’t win everytime.  It’s bad when Larry Mac is calling you out on the carpet for not giving interviews.  You can read it here.  I agree with everything he says there.  At some point no one is going to want to hire or sponsor Kyle and that’s a shame with the driving talent he has.

I started shooting a girl’s senior photos over fourth of July.  Since I’m not a pro and she’s not totally ready, I get to do a little here and there.  It’s nice.  I was super worried about it but she is so photogenic it’s not even funny.  I’ve had a blast doing it.  I hope she likes them.  I can’t wait to see them all printed.  I’m waiting on my CS4 to arrive.  Then I can have lots of fun with them.  I think I’ll go catch the mail box now.  Have  a great day!

I was doing a little google search on celebs that have the dreaded C.  There were like five listed.  I got to thinking why wouldn’t more people be listed.  Well, my number one guess is that people aren’t getting tested because they don’t know they symptoms and other associated issues.  So I’m going to be twittering them throughout the next few days. I’m going to try to post five tonight and five each day until I get them all. Ok so I tried that then realized very quickly it would be this time next year before I got it done.  It’s not that I want a whole bunch of people to have this but I don’t want people to suffer.

What started all of this,  why was I googling it to begin with?  I saw a quote on a message board that really bothered me.  It takes on average 11 years to be diagnosed here in the US.  It takes three weeks to get diagnosed in Europe. ELEVEN YEARS!!! Eleven years to be miserable for no reason other then our medical community doesn’t understand it.  So here we go….

1. bloating, gas and/or abdominal pain
2. Weight loss and fluid retention
3. Heart Failure
4. chronic diarrhea, pale, foul-smelling, or fatty stool, constipation
5. unexplained iron-deficiency anemia
6. fatigue
7. bone or joint pain, arthritis, bone loss or osteoporosis
8. depression or anxiety Behavior changes/depression/irritability
9. tingling numbness in the hands and feet
10. missed menstrual periods, infertility or recurrent miscarriage
11. Muscle weakness
12. Delayed growth or onset of puberty
13. Epitasis (nose bleeding)
14. Hematuria (red urine)
15. No obvious physical symptoms (just fatigue, overall not feeling well)
16. Vitamin B12 deficiency

Now for the issues that go along with Celiac check this link out Celiac Disease.  Yes, all of those things listed go along with Celiac.  So take a moment to read all the links provided there is a lot more information there then here.  If you start to wonder if you do have it go to Celiac Central do the checklist and take it to your doctor.  MAKE THEM DO THE TESTS!

References:

Celiac Central

Medicine Net

Celiac Disease Foundation

Celiac.com

This has been an interesting week for me.  My grandma spent Sunday night to Thursday afternoon in the hospital.  While I was there, I learned a woman I had worked with during high school had been told that the reason for her problems was Celiac.  Oh the joy right?

I spent a whole day emailing with her about things they didn’t tell her.  Have your parents and your child checked.  Why? It’s genetic, you had to get it from somewhere.  Check your make-up, hair dye, shampoo, and lotions.  Why?  It can all have wheat in it and you don’t want to be absorbing and undoing the healing you are trying to do.  I’m afraid I overwhelmed her, but I offered to answer what I could.

That evening my in-laws came up to sit with grandma while my husband and I went out for dinner.  We are pretty sure his mom has Celiac.  He asked her how her “rash” was doing now that she was watching her diet.  She told him the only thing she had cut out was bread because, “it hurts my stomach.”  Yeah, and you don’t think you’ve got Celiac huh?  Then the truth came out, she said, “I don’t want to have it.”  Well, no one else wants to have it.  It’s not a choice.

The next day hubby and I were discussing it and he said that if he had known he would have never had kids.  That’s how he feels about it all.  He would give up his two wonderful kids to spare them from having the same thing.

Last night I clicked on a link from twitter.  It was some one’s blog about being told that they had Celiac.  I wanted to cry.  The information given to that person was so far off that it wasn’t even funny, at least according to my research. Let me breakdown some points real quick.

• Less than 1% of the population has it.  Nope, the American medical community hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world in figuring out how to diagnosis it.  It is estimated that 1 in 133 Americans have it, but much less actually know it.
• Something has to happen for it to activate if you have the gene.  No, you either have Celiac or you don’t.  There’s no dormant Celiac.  The problem is there are so many things that actually caused by Celiac that aren’t connected to it.  Bloody noses, depression, ADD/ADHD, osteoporosis all can be signs of Celiac.  Most doctors treat the symptoms but don’t look for the cause.

I just read a great blog post.  I follow the writer on Twitter.  He has that horrible thing called Celiac.  Those with Celiac think they have it bad, try being the wife. It was more of a learning experience for me then anyone else.  That though is a whole other story.

In the blog he talks about what it’s like to dine out.  It’s tricky let me tell you.  We like to eat out, not that I don’t like to cook, I love it.  It’s just fun to eat out and we are lucky we can.  The thing I have found out though, it’s not so much fun to eat out with a Celiac person.  There’s only a few restaurants we can eat at.  They get boring after awhile.  I look forward to dinner out with the girls when I can eat some place that doesn’t have gluten free.

Our favorite gluten free restaurant – Outback Steakhouse in Topeka, KS.  Why?  It’s simple really.  They have dessert and a real menu, it was that simple.  Our first outing there was Valentine’s Day.  I told the host that we had a gluten free person with us.  That’s all it took, he got a special menu, they came out and talked to him about the menu, checked and double checked to make sure everything was coming out ok.  Then the moment of pure utter excitement, he got dessert.  It wasn’t just ice cream, it was a brownie.  Have you ever seen a 45 year old man act like a 5 year old girl who just got a pony?  Take a brownie loving Celiac to Outback, you’ll see it.  

The keys to eating out, find a couple of places that understand it, become their friend and tell them how much you appreciate the fact that they offer it.