A diagnosis of celiac disease will set one spinning: so much to learn, to consider, to do, to pitch, or to keep.
When Grace was diagnosed, I went into overdrive. I immediately hit the internet, spending off-hours worm-holing my way through content and suggestions – some things medical, most things practical. I bought books, went to the library and checked-out books: cookbooks, memoirs, and nearly everything that came up when I searched the catalog for celiac. I read and I read and I read. And I hovered – constantly, some might say, obnoxiously. I assaulted Grace with questions. What do you want to eat? What sounds good to you? What symptoms are you having? Have you been “glutened” or are you just in a bad mood? I was comforted to learn that that the eyeball rolling was in no way attributable to celiac, and was just the natural response of a teenage girl to an over-exuberant mother’s fervor.
Basically, I went from clueless to reasonably celiac savvy in short order. What I quickly gleaned, aside from the potential damage that celiac could wreak upon my child, was that we needed to change things, and fast.
All of the reading and research brought me to the conclusion that our home was not a safe haven for someone with celiac. I learned that gluten was everywhere and we needed a gluten exterminator. Sadly, I couldn’t call Terminix or the Orkin Man. This one was up to me!
As I considered this new diagnosis and lifestyle changes, one question kept arising: If you have celiac in the house but you also have people contentedly living the gluten life, how do you find a happy medium and avoid the gut-wrenching realities of your pre-celiac home?
That is a big question. A really involved, ongoing, no-easy-answer, type of question. The answer continues to reveal itself.
This work falls into three categories:
The Purge
The Surge
Fighting the Urge