my move, my stressful job, and the lack of insulation in our rental home (seriously, California, get it together). For a moment I even blamed my best friend, dairy. But that didn’t last long because I really couldn’t stay mad at dairy. Can anyone? In hindsight, I’d had a few severe bouts of stomach distress in the previous year, and I was convinced that I had developed arthritis at a very young age. Then there was that whole winter in New York when I thought the cold was responsible for my dry, flaky skin, yet it did not change even when I visited Texas, the land of humidity and the burrito. So even though the vegetarianism put me totally over the edge, the celiac symptoms had been slowly sneaking up, ready to attack as soon as they had a great reason. That great reason was pasta every day for a month. It wasn’t until I wound up in the emergency room because I was pretty sure my stomach was about to rip out of my body, and I couldn’t even breathe through the pain, that I finally took some advice from the ER doc. Two months later I walked into my fantastic GI doctor’s office (I know! How stubborn am I?) and was quickly scheduled for an endoscopy and colonoscopy. If you’ve never had the joy of a procedure that requires you empty out your entire insides before even stepping inside the doctor’s office, you are missing out on a serious good time. Yet here’s how sick I had been up until that point: When it was my turn to drink that battery acid that clears out your entire digestive system for, like, two days, it didn’t even faze me. Yep, my daily living with explosive diarrhea was much worse than the colon blow most people avoid even at the cost of dying from cancer. I remember coming out of the bathroom at midnight after about sixteen hours of the pre-colonoscopy regimen and saying to my husband, “Huh, that’s not so bad.” What’s also not so bad is the entire procedure if you have the proper insurance. I highly recommend you do make sure the procedure is covered before you wander into the hospital because you want to be completely knocked out for an endoscopy and/or colonoscopy. Trust me on this one. Go sell a few pieces of jewelry to cover the general anesthesia if it’s not covered. Because someone is going to shove a tube with a camera down your throat and up your rectum. You do NOT want to be awake for that. Also, you don’t want to hear what everyone is saying about you in the procedure room as they get an w h at to do w h en you ’ re crapp i n g your pants
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