Good news?

For the last several years my seizures have been slowly getting worse: more frequent, mostly.  And after the grande mal in September where my husband had me sent to the hospital via ambulance, terrified that I was about the die and leave him with three small children, I reluctantly agreed to put a little more effort into finding out how to control them.

Because none of the medications that I have been prescribed have ever worked, I decided to follow the advice of a second-cousin in Colorado whom also has seizures and start avoiding gluten.  So, in October, I gave it up.....Finally, but the third week of November, my seizures had ceased completely.  Really?  Stopped?  I was so confused.  I'm so used to having seizures that to go for a day....or two....or a week without having them made me nervous.  I decided that the connection may have been a coincidence and ate some pie for Thanksgiving.  Ten minutes later I had a seizure.  And kept having them.

Okay, I was convinced, it was the gluten.  I hate the idea of following what sounds to me like a 'fad diet', but I couldn't argue with the results.  The difficulty was always remembering to think about what I was eating.  It was easy to avoid bread and noodles, but this meant I couldn't eat our family Saturday morning pancakes.  Or flour tortillas with our Sunday lunch burritos.  I had to change my recipes for chicken enchiladas and not use canned cream of mushroom soup in casserole.  I couldn't eat packaged french fries.  Or the onion soup mix that I use in marinara sauce.  I even had to make up my own taco seasoning.  But the kicker came one Sunday when I realized that I couldn't eat the bread at communion. Gosh, that's not sacrilegious, is it?!

But the best day was when I was rereading through some year-old magazines and there was an article on neurology and celiac disease. The neurologist that was interviewed says "If you look at neurological disorders...you'll find a higher than expected percentage of these patients have celiac disease.  Some syndromes, like epilepsy with calcification in the brain, are definitely linked to celiac disease."

A-ha!  There was a tie-in!  I have had a calcium deposit on the back of my skull since I was born - my parents were told that it was related to my birthmark (Sturge-Weber syndrome).  But no one had ever told me that it was any more than that.  But here was the link - those annoying seizures were linked to my calcium deposit that were directly linked to eating gluten.  Amazing.  The thing I thought was so benign was actually the cause of my most obvious problems. 

I also was reading about something called gluten ataxia, which is when a person's gluten consumption leads to their clumsiness.  I tried to pass this off on my husband as the reason for my lack of grace in movement, but he wouldn't buy it.  Phooey.