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.

Oh bloggy friends it’s been a weekend.  I haven’t been sleeping well, which is making me emotional and to top it off the meds that should help me are only making me not sleep more.  I’ve had three hours of sleep in the past 36 hours so bear with me.  When I can’t sleep I think.  I’ve been thinking if the social media scene is really any different than a large high school.

I have to admit I have absolutely no experience with large high schools.  I graduated with twenty-one other people.  I’d known most of them since kindergarten.  We had groups, I wouldn’t call them cliques because everyone overlapped. It wasn’t taboo to sit at a different lunch table, party with different people each weekend or any of that other stuff.  My knowledge comes from T.V., movies, and stories from friends who did go to big  schools.

I have three social media accounts, myspace, Facebook, and Twitter.  Every once in a while I log into a Nascar message board too.  I never logged into Myspace anymore.  Facebook is my everyday friends.  I would guess that 95% of the people on Facebook I know in person.  I went to school with them, I met them in my college days, I work with them, or they are family.  I’ve never met a single person on Twitter, well I do follow a couple of people I know but they never tweet so I don’t count them. lol  My husband calls my Twitter addiction a place for my inner geek to come out.  All of the Facebook people who know me, know about my inner geek.  I just don’t get to talk geek with them.  On Twitter though, I can surround myself with people of like interests.  I’ve got the news/weather group, the Topeka group, the artistic group, the people I like chatting with most of them supply me with computer/tech news, the Celiac group, the Nascar group, and the HVAC group.

As I became more interested in Twitter and started branching out into finding people to follow other than the local news people, I started very simply.  I found twittergrader.com, found the top 50 people in Topeka, read their bios and followed anyone that sounded interesting to me.  I’ve followed people that I don’t exactly agree with, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn something from one of their tweets or connect with them on another issue.  One of my first new twitter friends said something about educating, enlightening, and engaging others would get you farther in the Twitterverse.  That’s when I began talking to others, retweeting things I found interesting, and posting things I thought were important.  Because of that small piece of advice, I’ve went from 10 followers to over 300 followers in the last month or so.  Twitter life was fun.  That’s how I was able to set up all those different groups.

Now how does all this relate to high school?  Glad you asked because here it goes.  Since, I went to a small high school there weren’t enough people to have your football jocks, your basketball jocks, your band geeks, drama geeks, ag people, ect.  We were all those things. lol  Everybody had something to do with the sports teams, the place to be on game night was at the game in some way.  When the FFA group left there was like five people left in the building.  I never and still don’t understand the thought that you can’t belong to different groups with varying interests or that all of your friends must be friends too.  If two people don’t get along then you have to pick one or the other.  Sorry not this girl, I don’t go for the clique thing and people who think that way really irk me.

Now what prompted all this?  Two disagreements with one person.  The first I thought nothing of, it was a simple difference of opinion in my mind.  I saw it as one thing the other person saw as something else.  No biggie, I have differences like that all the time with other friends, even my husband.  Then we had another disagreement over what something is called.  We aren’t talking the end of the world here folks.  After the second disagreement I get bombarded with direct messages from this person.  I stood by my original statement.  After the 9th direct message I was irritated.  I made a comment in general stream about people thinking everyone who put a youtube video up being an expert.  Then I get the tenth direct message of the day, this one saying I used to be cool until I got under the influence.  I didn’t get it.  I don’t drink and I don’t do anything illegal.  I couldn’t figure out the influence I was under.  I admit it I’m a little dense sometimes.  :-)

Because I was dense and upset I e-mailed another twitter friend, just to do some venting.  I started to get it, I have become friendlier with the second person in recent weeks.  We are both home during the day, his wife and I went to high schools 20 miles apart that played each other, so we had a working knowledge of each other.  Plus we are close in age.  For me that’s a new thing, I normally hang with people older so meeting a couple my age with similar interests excited me.  During that e-mail exchange I found out that the two people did not get along.  The second person had never said a word to me about that until I asked.

I thought it was silly.  I mean someone could think I was suddenly a different person because I started talking to someone else that they didn’t get along with.  HELLO HIGH SCHOOL!!  Later that night the first person was doing a webcast, I thought I would log in.  I was having problems logging into the chat but I could watch, so I did.  The next thing I knew my other friend and I were the topics of discussion.  I was shocked.  I sent a quick direct message to tell the person that if that person was going to talk about me, they should keep the story straight and tuned out.  I went to bed and couldn’t sleep.  So back to the computer I came tuned back into the webcast.  Well, guess what I was the topic of discussion again.  I was appalled.  I’m being called hurtful things by his little group of friends.  I had had it.  I couldn’t take it and sent a series of direct messages to the person telling them how rude I thought they were being.

I have thought a lot about it since then.  I was hurt.  I had never experienced that kind of torement from someone who was supposed to be a friend.  Then I realized this was nothing more than a high school like moment that others had talked about.  I was the new kid in school that become friends with the two rivals.  The one who thought I needed to make a choice and the one who didn’t.  I still haven’t made a choice, I don’t think I should.  However, the damage done to the first relationship may never be healed.

If you have a question for one of experts please leave a comment. All questions will be answered here and on Twitter, follow @MelissaMeek to see the answers there!