Melissa Writes

I’m having some major issues this afternoon.  I half way skimmed an article that came through my twitter stream this morning.  I blew off as an uneducated post and went on.  Then came the flood of people up in arms over said article.  Ok, now I had to go back and read it and the comments to it.  Now I’m upset.  You can read it here.

Idiots, all of them are idiots, well maybe not all of them but a good stinking portion of them are.  I don’t know one person suffering from Celiac that if given the choice wouldn’t give it all up for a slice of pizza and a cold beer from any place they wanted it from.  It’s not about moderation.  It’s not some fad diet.  It sure the hell isn’t because Elizabeth Hasselback wrote a stinking book!!!  It’s a real issue that effects not only the suffer but also the family of the person with Celiac.

Five years ago I met my husband, he told me he had Celiac.  I smiled nodded my head and went on about my business.  I later asked what that meant and he told me he couldn’t eat wheat but he wasn’t following the diet.  Oh ok, no biggie then.  I found out that he didn’t like a lot of my favorite things, he didn’t like pasta, he only ate pizza once in a great while, sandwiches were evil unless they were made from cracker like bread and loaded with as much filling as it could hold.  I could adjust, he loved my chicken and noodles, ate my baked foods like they were going out of style, and thought fry bread was the greatest thing every.  We got married and six months later we were in the doctor’s office.

It was the scariest thing in my life, ok not really but it ranked right up there.  One Sunday while I was watching a Nascar race, he was outside doing yard work.  I didn’t think anything of it.  A while later his nephew walked in with him they chatted for a while and the nephew left.  A few days later, I was finally let in on why the nephew walked him into the house.  He had collapsed in the yard.  I made a doctors appointment and we went.  It was now ten days after the collapse.  Blood work was done, EKG strip ran, full physical completed.  A few days later we got the results, the blood work showed major muscle damage, like a heart attack, but no heart damage.  He needed to see some specialists for testing.  He took the stress test and passed it with flying colors.  He went through all the testing for MS and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  They all came back negative.  He was still having horrible pains in his arms and legs.  The doctor said he was fatigued and dehydrated.  I didn’t buy it.

I started researching, low and behold his symptoms went hand in hand with Celiac.  I was relieved I now knew what was causing it. When he came home from work that evening, I told him about my discovery.  He was happy to know too.  He wasn’t ready to go back on the diet though.  Then came the flare from hell.  It went for days.  He a few days into it and he said, “I’ve got to go back on the gluten free diet.”  I sat down at the computer figured out what I needed to started ordering stuff and removing offending things from our kitchen.  I was happy to have an active healthy husband again.  Food was hard to get a hold of but as time went by things got easier to find.  Tasty alternatives to bread and pasta were being stocked in regular grocery stores.  Wal-Mart went from one of my least favorite stores to one of my favorites.  The fact that they labeled their food gluten-free was worth shopping there.  I became an advocate via the net for education in Celiac.

Now that all seems fine and dandy right?  Our lives were back to normal thanks to a diet change.  He was happy that there were options available that weren’t there when he was first diagnosed.  It didn’t seem so restrictive.  The options were varied, available on the regular grocery store shelves, there are a handful of ready to eat dinners we can store in the freezer it’s not so bad.  I started this blog to share my thoughts, joined twitter where I have a group of celiac friends, and even started another website to share local dining out options with fellow celiac families.

Then today I see that all the work that myself and others have done to get the word out is being made fun of.  Comments to that article are cruel and ignorant at best.  People saying it’s all in the head, moderation is key, ect.  I gave you a general overview of my journey with a celiac husband.  If you want to stop reading now, do so because the next part is going to be graphic and gross.

Remember when I said earlier he got the flare from hell?  Let me describe it.  He couldn’t sleep in bed with me.  He had diarrhea so bad it was like water.  He couldn’t relax or it would just run out.  Nothing he ate stayed in his body with in moments he was in the bathroom.  The longer it went on the weaker he got.  No sleep, dehydrated, and no nutrients equalled a grouchy husband.  He couldn’t stop it and that’s why he went back on the diet.  When he wasn’t on the diet every time he ate something with gluten in it this would happen for a couple of days.  Then after being gluten free for a couple of years, it happened.  He got accidentally glutened.  He told me that evening that he was sure he had gotten into something.  We both figured it would mean a few days of bathroom time and both blew it off other than to make note of what we were sure was the offending food.  The next day I got up for work, woke him up and he was complaining his shoulder hurt.  Still I thought nothing of it and went to work.  At 10:00 AM he was on the phone asking me to come home.  I was there within minutes, I work less than two blocks from home.  By 11:00 AM we were in the emergancy room with a outlook of a heart attack.  I called his mom at work and she came to the hospital as quickly as she could.  His dad was on his way too.  I told the doctor that he was Celiac and to please make sure any and all drugs given to him were gluten free.  The blood work finally came back no heart attack.  I was thankful.  Hours later after all the testing the doctor came in and told us the news.  There were four things that could cause what he had, a heart attack, an esophageal spasm, something I can’t remember, or Celiac.  Since the other three things had been ruled out it had to be the Celiac.  We were relieved to know that was all it was.  He spent the next month at the chiropractor though.  His stomach had cramped so hard and so bad that it dislocated his shoulder.

After reading all of that if you honestly can say that he would be fine if he just moderated his gluten intake you can think that.  I can’t change your mind.  He will not go back to eating a little gluten here or there.  It’s not worth it.  Until you have lived with someone who has it, you’ll never fully understand.

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

I figured my first post after the holiday would be about my reunion.  It was an exciting thing and I want to share with you all, but my state government has irked the living crap out of me.  I must vent about it.

Here in Kansas, we have a lovely statehouse.  It’s very pretty, has some great historic parts to it.  I also know that with old buildings that you have to do work on them so they don’t fall down around your ears.  I live in an older home, I’ve got that figured out.  There’s one thing that I have figured out that our lovely state reps must not have yet, if you don’t have money for the basics you have to hold off the remolding.

I know the economy sucks right now and that we all have to make sacrifices.  I was ticked off enough about the budget cuts  for education, the lottery was supposed to keep education funded.  Then today on the local news they announce that the state is issuing bonds to cover the renovation to the statehouse.  That’s right, we’ve cut the school’s budgets by $116 per pupil (rumors have it that another $116 will be cut by next year), but approved $38 million in bonds to keep the statehouse pretty.  Ummm….. it doesn’t matter how pretty something is if no one is educated enough to work there.  

Maybe that’s the state’s plan, cut funding for education, students lose out of many things, then when it’s time for them to get jobs they won’t have to pay as much.  I want to reach out and smack someone.  Get a clue!!!!  You can’t be dropping $38 million for a building, when you can’t fund education at the level it has been in the past.

You can read the whole article from wibw.com .  They are my local news channel that alerted me to this….. well….. I’ll let you fill in the blank for yourself.

I’m home this morning.  Grandma isn’t feeling well and the husband had to go to work today.  So I’m here, reading twitter.  I know exciting isn’t it? So I was catching up on all the tweets that had came through over night when I found one about volunteer firefighters being charged with arson.  It peeked my interest so I checked it out. Why don’t you check it out and read the comments Orangeville Volunteer FireFighters Charged with Arson I’ll wait for you before I start ranting.

You back now?  Read the comment about vollies being dogs?  Yeah can you guess what my rant is about now? Some big shot paid fire fighter thinks he is better then any volunteer out there.  I hate that attitude.  Not because I’m a volunteer fire fighter but because it shows that the person doesn’t have a clue about what it means to be a volunteer. You see we have to do the same training that the paid people do, the only difference is we are doing it on weekends, in the evenings after working all day, and for free.  Our shift never ends, we are only call 24/7, 365, rain, sleet, snow, hail, tornadoes, swine flu outbreaks, you name it we are there.  

That guy thinks something like that would never happen on a paid department.  He’s kidding himself.  Do a quick google search, there are plenty of them.  Heck, a few years ago there was someone who had done it in California that wrote a book.  He was the fire investigator.  Anyone else remember the book?

I hope that the man who called volunteers mutts someday needs our services.  Then he will learn that we are more professional than he is.

I’ve had two blogs before, both were super specific themes.  One was a Nascar blog, the other was a gluten-free blog.  I love both topics, the problem is I have a million hundreds interests.  I want to share them all. When you have a racing blog you can’t talk about your new knitting project.  I need a place to just write. Share myself with the world. So here it is, melissawrites.com.  Nifty huh?

I’m not going to bore you with the basics about me.  If you really want to know that, well find me.  I’ll tell you.  I will tell you what you can expect from this blog.  Nascar news, gluten-free, crafting, photography, fire fighting, rants, and maybe even a few raves about something; if you are lucky I might pull out a few old interviews I did for a Nascar site.  

How to find me:

Twitter: @melissameek

E-Mail: melissa@melissawrites.com