This morning, I realized just how thoroughly ensconced I am in this digital age. Okay, well, let’s be frank and admit that I’ve known that for quite a few years. But this morning, as I stood half-naked in my bathroom getting ready to brush my teeth, it hit me anew.

I’m standing there doing my thing when a little digital Jawa screams “Utini!” from the next room. Hi, I’m also a geek. Curious as to who is the email is from (What?  Jawas don’t announce your email to you?  Oh you poor thing!), I jam the toothbrush in my mouth and go to check.

It’s from Fitbit congratulating me on my 10 pound weight loss.

Um…it had been *less* than two minutes since I stepped onto my Withings scale and weighed.  I hadn’t even looked to see what I weighed a couple of days ago.  Yet Fitbit, not the Withings website, was cheering me on.  Granted, I have connected the two, but still, it’s a bit spooky to have a website send me an email congratulating me on a goal even *I* wasn’t yet aware I had met!

Yes.  Ten pounds down.  In two and a half weeks since I cut out gluten.  And the dent in the couch will convince you it ain’t from exercising more. Turns out gluten may really be my enemy after all.

Don’t you just love it when someone abandons you for months at a time, then comes back *poof* and makes a sudden and crazed 180-degree change in direction?

Hi, I’m back.  And I’m resurrecting this blog to document my and my family’s journey to becoming healthier and happier by cutting gluten from our diets.

Actually, if I *really* want to be ambitious, we’re trying to go quasi-paleo.  “Quasi” only because I cannot fathom (nor can my near-7-year-old daughter, The Unfamous G) a life without beans or (grass-fed) dairy.  Wheat?  Fine.  Pasta?  Fine.  Processed crap?  Grrrrr…okay, if we must.  Let’s just say that paleo is what we aspire to, but gluten-free is going to quickly become a way of life.

My and my husband’s pooch-guts were part of the reason for the change.  I took advantage of him being out of town in Las Vegas for a week and made a unilateral decision that this is something we needed to try.  See, this is what you get for going to Vegas for a week without your wife.  What?  It was work?  Riiiiiight.  Anyhoo…

So that was two weeks ago.  In that two weeks, I’ve cut gluten as much as possible without drastic measures from my diet and have noticed a change.  But more than that, I’ve been more carefully tracking our daughter’s reaction to gluten.  Tummy aches after she eats.  Deteriorating behavior after meals and snacks (which, with her in the middle of a growth spurt, meant all the friggen time).  Coughing and sniffing after meals.  She has a history of asthma and allergies.  She’s had epic bouts with pneumonia more times than we even count anymore.  Reflux.  Her mother’s poop issues (hi, mom!).  And more.  It’s been ridiculous.  And when I started paying attention to patterns, it started clicking.  Wheat.  Gluten.  Flavored chips.  Cereal.  Pasta.  Bread.  Oh my.

Of course, that lead to the ultimate facepalm moment.  Driving to work a couple of days ago, I remembered cleaning off my phone a few of weeks back and coming across a list of her food allergies.  What was that?, you ask.  Yes.  We had her tested for food allergies when she was 2 or 3.  Little.  And she was allergic to everything.  By everything, I mean the only things she MILDLY reacted to were turkey, garlic, fish mix, pecans, and strawberries.  Everything else was +3 to +4 to +Whoaholdontex!.  I pulled out the list and immediately started banging my head repeatedly on the steering wheel.  Wheat?  Was one of the five +Whoaholdontex foods. 

Now, in my defense, the list of symptoms the allergist gave us to look out for in her diet were all histaminic and some gut reactions.  Remember, she was 2 or 3 at the time, and she is STOIC.  It takes a near-death-experience, especially at that age before she discovered DRAMA, to get to her notice, “Wait.  I’m bleeding?  Oh no.  Let me shed a tear.”  We did the whole elimination and slowly-add-back thing.  And we thought we were clear. 

Skip forward 4 years and we’re standing in the pediatrician’s office watching the pediatrician do an absolute happy dance over my saying, “We want to try to take her gluten-f….”  Because she was dancing before the words were even out of my mouth.  Literally.  “I LOVE THAT IDEA!” she proclaimed, mid-samba.  “DO IT!  I LIKE THE WAY YOU’RE THINKING!  YES!  EXCELLENT IDEA!”  At which point I’m pretty sure the doctor in the next room was shushing her all-caps proclaiming. 

Needless to say, we now have the blessing of the ped.  And a few ideas.  And a plan.  And no food in the pantry because I just sent all of our gluten-laden stuff home with a friend of mine who has teenagers with metabolisms high enough that gluten nor calories have no time to touch anything internally.

It’s daunting, looking at our near-empty refrigerator and practically-bare pantry.  It’s also unnerving and unsettling.  If this, if gluten, is really responsible for the behaviors and the health and the allergies and the attitudes and the pooch-bellies, then I am the only one to blame for loading down fridge and pantry with the bad stuff.  I feel like those people who worked in White Sands.  We knew the radiation was dangerous, but it didn’t *feel* dangerous! 

At the same time, I hope this is it.  I hope this is the insidious little thing that’s been eating away at us all and making us miserable.  I really do.  Because if it is, it’s completely fixable.  Gonna be a journey though.  Gonna be a good, long journey.

Nine years ago (dear GOD, was it really NINE years ago?), my near-husband almost killed me on our first date.  Oh sure, we laugh about it now, and it wasn’t really HIS fault, but it has always made for a good chuckle.

See, it *really* all goes back to 1997 when I was partying like it was, um, 1997 in Wellington, New Zealand.  It actually goes back waaaaaay before then, but we’ll start there for all intents and purposes.  In 1997, I was having horrible, and I mean HORRIBLE, stomach cramps.  Curl up in the fetal position and want to die stomach cramps.  Followed up by a lovely case of Yoda-eye-itis.  We could NOT figure out the cause, neither the socialized med Kiwi docs nor my American family doc.  Nor an OB-GYN (“It’s not endometriosis, so I dunno.”).  Nor the Gastro (“IBS?  No?  Hrm…”). 

Mother’s Day of 1999, a miracle!  I went into Anaphylactic Shock!  YAY!  Well, that tells us it must be an ALLERGY!  Huzzah!  Three months of a grilled chicken/boiled potato/steamed green beans elimination diet and BLAMMO!  Mello Yello!  OMG!  CITRIC ACID!

Citric Acid = My Kryptonite.

Yay!  So, you know, just cut all that citric acid stuff out, and it’ll all be good!

Do you have any IDEA how many things have citric acid in them?  EVERYTHING.  Country Crock Shedd Spread!  Jelly!  Jam!  Cough Drops!  Head, meet desk.  Repeatedly.

Yet, it was cut it out or DIE, so I cut it out with occasional toe dips into the shark pool.  Take hibachi for instance.  At a hibachi dinner, when the chef prepped the shrimp appetizer, he’d squirt four drops of lemon on the shrimp then cook the tar out of those puppies on that hot hot grill.  The lemon would cook off.  Never gave me a problem.

Until (TA-DA!) my and NowHubby’s first date.  When we went to eat hibachi.  And apparently the chef got a little overzealous with the lemon.  As soon as dinner was over, I hightailed him back to his apartment (I’m the control freak who always has to drive), TRIED to politely say that, no, I wouldn’t go upstairs with him, but PLEASE don’t take it personally without letting on that I was DYING.  By the time I got back to my apartment, my eyes were all but swollen shut.  I spent the night writhing with cramps, my eyes burning and swelling, my chin swelling, my throat thankfully NOT swelling.  Come 9:00 the next morning when I headed into work donning the biggest, darkest sunglasses I could find, I was NOT cute.

My office mate insisted I take the glasses off.  “OH MY GOD!  WHAT DID HE DO TO YOU?”  At which point, he came around the corner and nearly flipped the hell out.  We all managed to chillax a bit and come up with a version that decidedly did NOT make it look like we were going on a date (“Curtains!  He needed curtains!  We went to look for curtains because he didn’t know where around here sells curtains and we were hungry and the Japanese place was right there next to the curtain place and and and….”) which everyone (mostly) bought.  The (mostly) being because a few people knew damn well that I know NOTHING about curtains.  Or where to procure such things.  Or even how to BEGIN to help someone pick out curtains.  My house to this DAY doesn’t have curtains, but now I’m rambling.

(Only now?)
(Shut up.)

So, LOL, my husband tried to kill me on our first date.  Tee hee.  How funny.  How quaint.  How TOTALLY not true.  (“Citric acid? Really? You sat there and WATCHED him put lemon on the shrimp!  And you ate it ANYWAY??” “Yes, but it usually cooks off so nicely!”)  But funny, so we still tell it.

In the following months, my stomach continued to rebel harder and harder to the point that making it to work before 9:30 was physically impossible, what with the hour it took me to get out of my bed and upright, not to mention the time I had to spend BACK in the fetal position after peeing and brushing my teeth.  Fortunately, I loved my boss and she loved (tolerated) me, and I worked all hours of the night, so nobody really called me on it, but it was totally making me feel guilty.

Someone, perhaps even my boss, sent me to a pelvic pain specialist, Dr. Doody (hee hee).  Dr. Doody (hee hee) poked and prodded and took three weeks to inject lidacaine and saline directly into several abdominal trigger points every third day in hopes that THAT was the problem.  Finally, after I was adamant that, while my coworkers enjoyed watching me constantly roll off the exercise ball I had to sit on after the TP injections, they weren’t helping, he said, “Well, we can test you for interstitial cystitis, but I can promise you its not that.”

Ten minutes later, he was staring at me, me in tears, rubbing his head.  “I can’t believe that’s what it is!”

Turns out, I’m not allergic to citric acid.  It merely pissed off my lining-less bladder to the point that my bladder was opening weird gates allowing the citric acid to leech into my abdominal cavity which caused my body to, of course, scream INVADERS! and go into contortions.  “But you may also have the allergy.  We cannot rule that out,” Dr. Doody (hee hee) said.

So I maintained my citric-acid free existence.  Until I had an IC flare in 2007 and sought out an IC-specializing OB-GYN who looked at me once and said, “Well, yeah, the symptoms you were having were absolutely consistent with the complications of the IC.  NOT an allergy.  Go eat an orange.”

Really?  Go eat an orange?  Dude.  I hate oranges.  Not to mention it had been 8 years since I’d had one.  “Take it easy.  Go at your own pace,” he advised.  “You may be surprised.  And if not, here.”  Ha!  Your prescription for an EpiPen makes me feel SO much better, doc!  I get your irony!  Regardless, I’ve been baby stepping.

It is now 2012, and, over the Christmas holidays, through one of those “my child wanted a Sprite from the hotel vending machine but she doesn’t LIKE Sprite but we paid $2 for said Sprite and I’d really hate for it to just go to waste” things, I took a few swigs of her Sprite.  I waited for pain.  Took a long drag of Sprite.  Savored it.  Waited.  Downed the entire can.  Waited.  Didn’t sleep.  Just stayed awake communing with my stomach who really just wanted me to stop talking to it so IT could sleep.

I never particularly cared for Sprite before.  But now?  OMG.  THE SPRITE!  IT NO LONGER WILL KILL ME!!  I HAVE BEATEN IT!

So I guess really the whole point of the story is this:  Thanks to SPRITE OH THE LIQUID FROM HEAVEN, I am, without even the slightest hint of a problem, off of caffeine, but the carbonation, oh it is just SO SWEET.  ‘Course, I have issues with artificial sweeteners, so Diet Sprite is a last-ditch effort, but really.  Must wean myself off the fizzes soon.

But oh, my dear Sprite, how much my dear tongue hath missed your sweet-sour bubbly tang!

I have these goals.  They are great and varied.  Convert my office into a Thai Massage space so I can, um, finally start practicing Thai Massage.  I want to find the magic unlocking sequence to whatever it will take to keep The G’s playroom clean for more than 7.4 seconds,  I want to sit back and reevaluate the people in my life and my place with them so as we are all getting max benefits.

I have a whisper of an inkling of an idea for a shop that offers a range of massage services, all crafted to a very individual session.  I’d love to finish a neuromuscular session and suggest for their next session they drop in and see X for a fantastic Thai massage to open up the sen lines, to let the lom flow, then they can go right down the hall for Reiki and maybe some warm wraps and herbal packs.

It’s all much clearer in my head than it is on this page, I’m sure.  The brain it still be not firing as it should be.  Stinkin’ grey matter.

Can neural tissue be held together by duct tape?

It’s been so damn long I don’t even have the smidgest of inklings for how to start this thing back up.  I’d kick the tires and white glove the ledges and obsessively check to make sure tweezers and napkins are stowed in their proper positions, but that would assume I have some knowledge of what car I’m in…or what even all that metaphormosa means.

It’s Tuesday, and I have fought all day with the little men in my mind over what day it really is.  It’s Thursday, I decided early.  Except the calendar says it can’t possibly be Thursday because a) and b) aren’t on the books.  Then again, yesterday couldn’t possibly have just been yesterday, could it?  I really thought we ate that meal at that restaurant on Monday night and that’s surely been much longer ago than yesterday.

I’ve lost you, haven’t I?  Welcome to my brain.  It fires, but unlike the nice streamlined firings of neurons one would expect and even take for granted, it’s more like part of my brain is absolutely ON THE TASK while the rest of the grey matter is sneaking around sending message to other rebellious gray matter to completely reenact a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.  So I sit here, sometimes pleasantly surprised by where I am physically and how much if differs from where I was mentally.

Something’s going on and, while I have an inkling, I just ain’t sure.

Here’s hoping anything else I add in these here pages will be multitudes more coherent than this rambling blather.  Oy.