Gluten-Fuelled Delight

That night I stocked up on organic wheat flour. I decided that if we were going to stress out her body with gluten, the least I could do was use chemical-free ingredients, right? For the next six weeks, we baked. We made muffins and we made cookies. We made tortillas. We nailed cinnamon rolls.

River and I baked bread together at least twice a week, kneading out the dough by hand while we watched the birds out the kitchen window. It felt sooooo good. It felt so wholesome! So homeschool-y!

Healing from Gluten-Intolerance

We were surprised when River complained a little bit. She missed her gluten-free pizza. Sigh. Really?! And some days we forgot to eat something with wheat because we were just so used to going without. But for the most part, River had at least a slice of bread or a donut each day. And she didn’t seem to react at all.

Wait – what?!

Nothing. No reactions. For four weeks, I was equally delighted and horrified – horrified from the thought that I had denied my daughter a year of birthday cakes and Chinese takeout for no reason at all. I don’t know, maybe the symptoms had been all in my head. Maybe I just wanted to fit in with my crunchy friends. I mean, I vaccinate my kids so a Weston A Price-style gluten-free diet is the only crunchy card that I have left to play. Other than going vegetarian, I guess. But lentils and I don’t always get along.

I started to search the web for answers. I read that some people are able to outgrow a gluten-intolerance by abstaining from wheat for a long period of time – this gives their gut time to heal. Maybe that’s what happened for River. I figured we should still do the celiac testing to be sure, and once she was cleared,  maybe we’d shift to a sourdough diet given that fermented breads are easier to digest. And mostly because I love sourdough. So win-win, right?

Then, at about five weeks, River started to show symptoms again. She started to throw up – just a little bit, but every two or three days, just like before we gave up gluten. She became super emotional. She had irrational fits of rage. I dismissed it, though. Sourdough, remember? But it got worse. At six weeks, she asked to go back to her gluten-free diet. I asked her to stick it out for two more weeks. At seven weeks, she tearfully begged me to quit the gluten-friendly diet. She hated the way she felt.

She was also incredibly stressed by the thought of the blood test – it was keeping her up at night. Oh my poor darling. I agreed that she could do the test a few days before the eight weeks were up. Then, the next day, I took her to the lab with no advanced warning at all.

We did the test. It went worse than I expected. And then we went back to gluten-free.

I don’t remember how long it took for the official diagnosis to come back, because I really didn’t care anymore.

Not celiac.

Now what?