glutenized by a pickle

There is a certain amount of complacency that sets in when you have a food allergy or food intolerance. You read labels religiously. You spend an obscene amount of time reading cookbooks and food allergy blogs. You develop a diet and culinary repertoire that is designed to keep you both fed and healthy. You start to carefully experiment at restaurants, confident in your interrogation of the waitstaff. You take all these careful, tightly controlled steps and start to feel well. You start to feel so good that you develop a somewhat egotistical swagger like you've figured out the whole intolerance-free eating thing and it's really no big deal at all.

In fact you start to feel so good that you begin to wonder if your food intolerances are all in your head. "I haven't been glutenized for weeks," you think and wonder if you really are gluten intolerant. The more time that passes where you successfully avoid gluten the more you wonder what would happen if it's psycho-somatic. Everyone knows gluten intolerance is all the rage in the food world, right? Maybe last summer you just hit a bad patch. Wasn't there a stomach bug going around? You think about eating a regular piece of pizza and imagine yourself enjoying it. Eating pizza just like everyone else does and not getting sick. The more you think about eating pizza the more the fantasy becomes real and the more you become convinced that the blood test that showed positive for Celiac was a fluke. You want that pizza so much that you can taste it. And you start to fantasize about the moment when you discover that you're suddenly and miraculously cured.

You don't eat the pizza. Intellectually, you know better and if you are wrong you will be sick for days. Emotionally you struggle and wonder if all the drama over your diet is really necessary.

Enter a pickle. Actually, enter a party for a co-worker where deli sandwiches have been ordered. You don't order anything because you can't eat anything on the menu (right?). But your co-workers have ordered the most delicious looking sandwiches you've ever seen. Piled high with veggies on pumpernickel bread. Yum. Two of your co-workers have a pathological disdain for pickles and offer them for grabs. You don't think twice and claim them. The pickles are wrapped in their own little paper, right next to the sandwiches that are wrapped in their own little paper wrappers. Two little dill pickle quarters. You eat them.

It's not until later, the next day really, that you realize the pickles were probably cut with the same knife the sandwich was cut with and probably touched the bread or shared crumbs with the sandwiches. You don't realize this until you feel so sick that you can barely stand. You are so sick that you feel like you are going to vomit everywhere and when you speak to your co-workers you make sure there is a nearby wall on which to lean. Your stomach hurts so much you think you are going to cry. The nausea comes in waves and once it subsides the ache in your gut lingers for hours. You review everything you ate yesterday. It was nearly identical to everything you ate on Monday. The only difference was the pickle. The pickle that came from the deli with the amazing bread and delicious sandwiches.

In a way you are happy that this happened. It's a strong slap to the head to remind you that you are gluten intolerant and it hasn't disappeared overnight. You are reminded of the importance of remaining ever vigilant and not taking things for granted. You are relieved that you didn't eat the pizza you long for. You can barely function from the ingestion of some crumbs; the pizza would have leveled you. You also feel like an idiot. You wonder if maybe you really haven't accepted what's happened to you and worry that you're cracking. You feel stupid for breaking your self-imposed cross-contamination rules. Your confidence has been shattered and you feel like you are starting from square one.

But mostly you just feel sick. From a pickle.