Book Four: A New Theme

I suppose one good thing about being diagnosed with celiac is that I have more books that are of interest to me now.

The first: Celiac Disease: A Hidden Epidemic by Peter H.R. Green, M.D. and Rory Jones Thrilling title, huh? But it was educational and not normally depressing (despite the earlier snippet from it I shared about my increased rates of, you know, a horrible death.)

I did discover while reading this that I cannot read celiac-realted things before bed. It gives me weird and stressful medical- and disease-related dreams. Not restful.

I've also learned that I'm probably going to be pretty dang low-risk when it comes to what foods I eat and the potential cross-contamination. Honestly, before I was diagnosed (but after I knew I had the gene), I figured I'd be a little more of a risk taker when it came to choosing food. I should have known better given how paranoid I always was when it came to safely feeding my mother.

But yeah, all the pain in my hands and feet I've been dealing with plus a three-day-long reaction-from-hell after eating some brown rice pasta that, best we can figure, was likely contaminated (before it got to me) and I'm definitely on the strictly-gluten-free-is-good bandwagon. (Because three days of feeling like my finger has a serrated knife sawing into the bone with every movement? Not fun. On the positive side, three days seems to be the limit of the pain - I ate that pasta twice and both times hurt like the dickens for three days then things started going back to normal. Which also explains why my hands stopped hurting during the week and a half of my cold - for about a week of that, I lived off of homemade (gluten-free) chicken soup. Felt better, added my normal wheat-based cereal in again and, bam, pain!)

And this post has nothing to do with the book other than I read it. So yeah. I read it. Have celiac? Read this book. It's much preferred over the group-hug-let's-sing-kumbaya-in-gluten-free-solidarity or jump-on-the-gluten-free-fad-diet books that seem to overwhelm an Amazon "celiac" search.

Next up, more celiac-themed reading: Gluten Freedom by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty. I'm really looking forward to this one. My mom speaks highly of Dr. Fassano and he's a pretty big name in celiac so that's cool. But I'm mostly excited by the fact that this book was just published (Amazon shows the publication date as the 29th, but I got my pre-order today) compared to Dr. Green's book which was revised and updated back in 2010. Yay current information!