Wheat The People

Every year in March, I go to the doctor for a check-up. I don’t particularly enjoy the paper dress/show me your insurance card combo, but it must be done and my birthday is in March, so it’s easy to remember. Every year when my odometer turns over, I go in for a tune-up.

My doctor drew my blood, listened to my lungs, complimented me on my weight loss, and said he’d call when the results came in. Two days later, he leaves a message on my voicemail. “Hi, Amy. Doctor Kirk here. I got your blood test results and you’re pretty anemic. Give me a call.”

When I reached him, he repeated his message. ‘Man, Amy, you’re anemic. I mean, really anemic.”

He goes on about how anemia can be caused by a number of things, including a simple iron deficiency, but he wants to check everything out on the inside to make sure I don’t have any secret bleeding going on. He gives me the name of a practice near my office and tells me to call once I have the appointment scheduled. Their name? Midwest Digestive Disease.

I’m pretty sure I hyperventilated the rest of the afternoon. Through it, I managed to stay at work (barely) and call the appointment desk for Midwest Disease (that’s what they call themselves). Magically, they had an appointment for the next day. Just an office visit; please have your doctor fax over the blood results. You’ll be here no more than 20 minutes, and there’s no need to fast or freak out.

That’s what they think—clearly they’ve never met me.

The “Midwest Disease” staff was really nice, and the doctor was friendly and incredibly forthcoming with information. He showed me my results on his laptop, pointing out that not only do I have low hemoglobin, but that my red blood cells are smaller than normal. He stands up and points to a poster of the human insides. “Anemia generally has 4 causes. The first, iron-deficiency, has 3 common sources.”

On he went, detailing every possible combination of reasons why this was happening. My multi-vitamin didn’t have iron, I had heavy periods, I was unable to absorb iron, I gave blood regularly; on and on. I’m pretty sure he has Asperger’s, because he was looking in my direction, but he rarely made eye contact. Oddly, the Asperger’s set me a bit at ease. I’m pretty comfortable with brainy, engaging males who are sometimes fleeting in their eye contact. Plus, it somehow made him really human, which reduced my blood pressure off the 4-alarm stage. He said good-bye, and then another very nice nurse scheduled an appointment 2 days later at Edwards Hospital.

The Edwards Hospital staff is other-worldly in terms of their service. In the 3 hours I spent at the hospital, I talked to no fewer than eleven people. Every one of them was friendly, engaging, and working to calm me down. I was freaked out beyond belief, and the procedure itself gave me the dry heaves in terms of its invasiveness and possible Bad News Outcomes. Even so, each nurse had something warm and soothing to say. There was no chit-chat between staffers, no pretending I couldn’t hear them while they gossiped, and no acting as if we were all sitting at a bus stop, except that one of us was wearing heated blankets and an i.v. They worked, they talked to me, and when the doctor came in, he gave a little intro. “This is Amy. She has anemia, and we’re going to check and make sure everything is all right with her.” Then, when it was time to begin, the nurse closest to me said, ‘This is where you’re going to start forgetting things.’
She was right. I had been told I’d be in ‘twilight’ sleep, but my mind is completely blank and black until I was in recovery and Howard was talking to Doctor Asperger.

One business day later, I was on the phone discussing results. No bleeding, no suspicious things, but evidence suggestive of celiac disease. Dr. Asperger wanted to run a blood screening test. I called Dr. Kirk, who responded, "Wow, Celiac". We agreed to screen me, deciding that we’d check my blood for anemia again, now that I’m on an iron supplement and eating spinach with every meal.

I’m not having the test until after I get back from Florida, but in the mean time, I’ve done some research on Celiac Disease. It’s like an armadillo: I’d never heard of it before, and then as soon as I typed it into my search engine, it was everywhere. Even Weight Watchers had a discussion board full of women who had had the disease for years.

Celiac Disease is essentially Gluten Intolerance, a condition where the body does not recognize wheat and its kin as nutrients. It views them as viruses or enemies and ‘flattens out’ the little hairs in the small intestine, refusing to absorb nutrients in or around the wheat. It’s apparently incredibly common (1 in 133 adults), wildly undiagnosed (estimated 97% of those affected do not know) and takes an average 11 years to uncover.

The disease used to be a childhood ailment and the unlucky youngsters diagnosed were doomed to a diet of bananas and baby food for their whole, stunted lives. Now, while gluten-free food is affordable only if you pay in gold bars, it is plentiful, especially if you are willing to cook for yourself. Low fat is tougher, but the closer you stick to the ‘ground’, e.g., eating whole foods, the easier it is to keep the grain out of your life.

Even with all that, going to the grocery store looking for gluten-free foodstuffs is a bit like running with scissors over broken glass while your hair is on fire and hoping you won’t get hurt. Wheat and its long line of aliases are the base metal of foods, the petroleum of the ingestible. Apart from the obvious places--cereal, bread, and pasta, wheat is in (nearly) everything processed, most soups, some make-ups and many vitamins (in the capsules). Moreover, even if you eat something that’s gluten-free, if it was cooked on a grill with wheat, the teeny gluten microbes can stick to the food and make you sick.

If it goes undetected long enough, severe anemia can develop, or significant bone loss, or even cancer. FYI, last fall when I got my mammogram, Dr. Kirk suggested I get a bone scan as well. I have thinning bones. It’s a common thing in tall, thin women, but I was 43 when the test was done, which is pretty young to show borderline osteoporosis. So even though I have no symptoms of celiac, I suspect that something is up.

So, insofar as I can, I’ve given up the Glute. I have found nothing that shows a detriment to removing it from my diet. Whatever I need in terms of fiber, roughage, grain or vitamins can be had from other sources. My carb intake is pretty low anyway, so the challenge will be to wipe it out entirely. I’ll need to take a magnifying glass to every vitamin capsule, every high-fiber wrap in the freezer, and everything that’s not in its original form. It will be tough, but Howard has already donned his Cooked Crusader Cape and declared himself up for the challenge.

The thing that concerns me is DS. Celiac disease is hereditary, and so if I have it, he may as well. Doing the de-glute on him will be much tougher. His favorite food is pizza, and after that is Cheerios. We tried gluten-free pizza last year and he picketed the front lawn. When I offered him gluten-free cookies in apology, he threatened to sue. But if he has it, then the wheat must go. Whatever the pain, I will do it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that children with autism spectrum disorders show a marked reduction in disorder symptoms and behaviors when the gluten is removed from their diet. It can take 6 months to pull it all out and get the small intestine villi back in action, but when they recover, they do so completely; so long the child remains free of the amber waves.

It’s a tough time to be investing in this type of food, but I guess we’ll just have to consider it part of our health insurance premiums. If it truly helps, then it’s worth it. No offense to Dr. Asperger and the cast of Zen Scrubbers I met at the hospital, but even with their terrific service, I’d rather not have to go through any of this again if I can avoid it.

By the way, in the first moments after discovering my anemic condition, I called Howard to find out how much iron was in my regular multi-vitamin. There was none. Zero. Zippo iron in a women’s formula multi-vitamin. I got a supplement right away, but are you kidding me? I’ll be really irritated if I went through all this just because I was too dumb to read a label.

But no, there were lessons here, even if my only illness is stupidity. I don’t need gluten, and we could all potentially be healthier without it. I can always find other ways to gum up my insides. After all, every time Howard travels, I have to cook for myself.

A the G(lute No More)

Bridge to Nowhere

After slogging through a beast of a course last term, I am now enrolled in Economics for Dummies, a prerequisite to the MBA-level Economics for Bozos class that’s part of my regular program. I took economics as an undergrad, but since it has been more than 5 years since the final (way more, in fact), I do not qualify to skip this class, and so I am enrolled with 16 other dunderheads, most of whom are new to grad school, and all of whom have never had the guns vs. butter conversation so prevalent in intro courses.

Because it’s a preemie class, the work load is considerably lighter than the last few terms, where I’ve barely coming up for work or food from the time the syllabus is published until after the final is posted. So after 8 straight terms of bore-in-don’t-stop intensity, I now find myself in a place where I have some time in the evenings for interests other than Finishing This Dang Degree.

My reprieve is well timed, since we’re about to embark on our annual spring journey to Florida, soaking up the sun and pretending that we’re not still on Winter’s last pouting lip here in Chicago. Howard and I, looking for things we can do with my in-laws and also for ways to entertain ourselves later on, decided to take up Bridge. I’d heard many things about the game, and my in-laws are enthusiasts. What a nice thing, I thought, to pick up a game that is known & loved down in Florida, and that Howard and I can share with his family.

As it turns out, Bridge is less a card game and more a combination of Chess, Greek, Cooking, Power Aerobics and Mortal Combat. The books I read make me feel like I’m prepping for a Senate confirmation: give as much of the truth as you can without really saying anything while simultaneously trying to decipher the code that’s going on in the seats across the aisle. You want to be careful that you communicate everything you can to your partner without giving away too much. And don’t undersell: you’ll be sorry if it comes up later. It’s better to take the penalty than to let the other side walk away with all those voters, er, points.

Howard and I have split up the learning tasks, with me studying the bidding structures and Howard working on trick play. So while Howard gets to watch cards whiz by on his monitor, answering condescending questions (and how could we have done that better, hmmmm?), I struggle to translate passages such as this:

“Decide up front what bidding convention you will use, such as “Strong No Trump Rodwell” and remember that 4NT is a false bid, meaning you have between 16 and 18 HCP, and that your response to partner’s declaration is 5C if you have either 4 or zero aces.”

I have no idea what I just wrote.

My personal favorite is the follow-on to this comment, which suggests that partners decide in advance what ‘convention’ they’ll use to communicate during bidding, and that they must share that convention with their opponents. “Secret bidding is unethical in bridge. You have every right to ask an opponent what his bid means.” I find this hilarious. I can see it now:

Grandpa Rosen: 3 Diamonds
Me: What does that mean?
Grandpa Rosen (looking puzzled): It means 3 diamonds.
Me: Okay, thank you.

So glad I asked.

Despite the aggravation of the bid language and the skulk-through-the-grass-and-then-Kill!-Kill!-Kill! tone of the books I’m reading, I do find the game fascinating. This isn’t like Accounting or Real Estate, where the idea is simple, but the terminology has been deliberately stretched & morphed so that no reasonable person could understand it and the profits are left to those who do.

No, Bridge is more like tennis. If you ask someone how to win at tennis, they'lltell you that it’s important to get the ball over the net and inside the lines more often than your opponent. But really, it’s really all about getting your opponent to get the ball over the net and inside the lines less often than you. It’s about chipping away at his points and his confidence until he chucks his racket at the fence in frustration, after which it's just a matter of time before you're shaking hands at the net feigning humble surprise at your win.

So it goes with Bridge. Ladies and gentlemen sit down at the table, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ even when they don’t mean it, politely overlook each other’s errors and pretend not to know what everyone else is talking about during the bid, even though they know precisely what is going on. Play moves from bid to trick, whereupon each side tries to get the other to win fewer tricks than they do (rather than trying to win more tricks than the opponents). After a while, people shake hands, change seats and start over.

I like the dichotomy of it—using cards as weapons while behaving as if they were handkerchiefs, or playing tricks like barracuda while swimming like a swan. It’s the height of competition played at the peak of politeness. Pretty cool stuff for 52 pieces of plastic with odd artwork on them.

And if none of that works and I’m still spinning around in circles wondering why my partner said 2 spades when he really wanted to play diamonds, I can always just offer to play the dummy hand. I’m really good at that.

A the W(eak Two)*

*It’s a Bridge thing.

Slimming Down

Howard lost his job on January 30.

It was not all bad news. Howard had suffered nearly every day of the 16 months he was employed at the great Chicago retailer. For over a year, he was working any time he was awake, and sometimes he was working when he should have been asleep. It was so bad for the last six months that I couldn’t remember what he looked like without his blackberry posed in front of his face, or without a grim, furrowed frown etching deep lines into his mouth.

Even so, the loss of half our income is a blow. He had 3 good leads right from the start. Two have dried up, and the third, while promising, is sputtering along at an unpromising pace. He refuses to travel, which I appreciate, and he’s flexible on his earnings, which concerns me, but not as much as losing him to the Friendly Skies or to another Blackberry nightmare.

In the mean time, we’ve strapped in, eliminating all extraneous spending. Even our grocery bill has taken a hit: we plan a menu for the week ahead of time, we take a list, and everything comes from the discount market up the road. Budgets are firm, no exceptions. I’d rather have a little less soda now than have to start eating Doritos on sale in a few months.

The upside is that we’ve managed to sock away quite a bit in the last few weeks. And we’ve all learned quite a bit about how to entertain ourselves without wasting money in the process. For example, we rarely used the Wheaton Public Library except for occasional excursions to preview a magazine we considered subscribing to, or to peek at books that were of interest, but held no long-term shelf value for us. Now we’re there Saturdays and Sundays every weekend that DS is around. DS and Howard play games on the library computer and I browse for books or leaf through old Weight Watcher magazines, and we always take books, movies (March of the Penguins!), CDs and new games home for the week. It’s a free date and it’s entertainment rich for everyone.

I’ve started bringing my lunch to work everyday as well. Since Howard isn’t eating downtown anymore, this is a huge cost savings for us. Plus, since I’m fully regulating my food intake and not subsisting on salads all day long, I’m fuller and my weight is stable in the low to mid 150s all the time. Plus, since I take time for lunch, I’m able to read a little bit of non-MBA while I enjoy my maintenance-friendly meal.

One of the books I borrowed from the library was the Beck’s Diet Book by Judith Beck. Her approach is similar to the Weight Watchers philosophy, but is a little more hard core and also a little more realistic in terms of living life as a former heavy person in a fat-filled world. I’ve picked up a bunch of new habits that have slowed down my eating and given me the strength to resist cravings even during PMS times. I feel more stable than I have in years, maybe ever.

In fact, this whole experience has slowed me down considerably. I’m more measured all day long, and more likely to think things through before (over)reacting to bad news. I eat slower, move slower, and have more peace in my mind than I have had in a very long time. This loss of income has transferred into an important growing lesson for all of us. Howard and I are a couple again, rather than two flyby adults living in the same house with a son in common. He’s back on track with his diet, and is rolling around in the joy of being a full-on Daddy. DS, ever the loving boy, skipped all the resentment he was owed for losing his “Rosen” all those months and is now happily crawling all over Howard at night. The two of them found a Math video game a few weeks back and now they spend part of every evening defending the Solar System against some wizard that is afraid of numbers.

Plus, I’ve just surfaced from the hardest course of the MBA program (so far!), so I was able to sneak in some extra homework time while the boys did simple algebra at the desk next to me.

It’s always been my experience that those who get pushed out of the tree always land on a higher branch. I don’t know if that will be the case for us financially; right now it doesn’t seem so. And I don’t know how long this strapping in will have to last. I do know that it’s made us all stronger, and happier, and I intend to keep up the spending freeze once Howard goes back to work. Of course, I might downgrade it to a spending “slush”, but the idea is the same. Spending money does not entertain—at least, not for long. But spending time with my family does, and the return on investment is completely unmatched.

No slick aphorisms this time. I’m truly happy just to have my life and my family back, even if it’s in Discount Mode right now. We’re going to be all right: we already have everything that we need. We’re doing what we love; the money is sure to follow.

A the C(ontented)