Essays: Food

I Dream of Bagels

When I was 6 years old, I lived in Dallas, Texas, and I had a best friend named Judy. It was at her house that I first ate a bagel. I fell in love with its chewy, crusty texture. I didn’t know much at that age, but I knew that I loved eating those bagels I couldn’t get enough.

I also knew, from a very young age, that something was wrong with me. Something that they would one day discover and name after me. I had stomachaches all the time. I can’t remember a time when my stomach didn’t hurt at least a little bit.

“You were so healthy when you were young,” my mother is fond of saying. Painfully shy and uncomplaining- yes. Healthy, no. We were just blissfully unaware of what lay in wait for future doctors to discover.

In high school, I was anemic, and experienced several bouts of tachycardia that were written off to anxiety. And then after I was married, I twice struggled with infertility. Later, the “stomachaches” returned and worsened and doctors removed my gallbladder thinking that stones were to blame and then my uterus thinking it might be hormones causing my symptoms.

Along the way, in trying to diagnose me, doctors discovered insulin-dependent diabetes, low thyroid and high cholesterol. I also have bipolar disorder. I take a combination of 13 medications a day for my health maintenance, and I’ve been to the hospital at least 18 times in the past two years. But still, I felt that they hadn’t hit upon that one thing that was really wrong, that was causing my stomach to hurt so badly.

Then, two years ago, I added “severe bone pain” to my ever-growing list of symptoms and went to see a rheumatologist. He found that I had no Vitamin D in my blood a tell tale sign that something was wrong with my gut. Next came the antibody test and then a biopsy that proved that the tiny villi that lined my intestines were indeed “flattened.” We had a diagnosis after only 10 years of actively seeking one: I had celiac disease, an auto-immune disease where you can’t digest wheat or gluten, the wheat protein.

“What? I can’t eat bread? I can’t have bagels?”

I was sure I would starve to death when I heard that this removal of all glutens from the diet was the only treatment for the disease whereby the lining of a person’s intestines is badly damaged. If left untreated, it could lead to malnutrition, brain ataxia, osteopenia, and eventually a cancer called lymphoma. The damaged intestines would repair themselves with the

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