When I was born my mother became very sick. I don’t actually remember this but I’ve been told that she spent months in bed with excruciating stomach cramps that left her largely incapable of the usual tasks associated with caring for a newborn.  Then, after dozens of tests and a handful of doctors, she got better overnight.

She was diagnosed with celiac disease. An auto-immune disease set off by the inability of the intestine to process gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. In my mother’s case this was the cause of her stomach cramps and all those usual gastrointestinal complications. Her gastroenterologist discovered the celiac disease by inserting a small pod attached to a tube down her throat and taking a biopsy. A procedure she later mythologized as being one of the worst things she had gone through in her life. She immediate began a gluten-free diet and felt better just as fast. Thirty years ago this diet was far from what it is today. My mother survived on rice cakes – something she can no longer even look at without post-traumatic flashbacks.

I admit that while I grew-up, I was less than understanding of her situation. I would consume massive amounts of bread and cookies with a relish that must have been difficult for her to witness. And as you know, karma is a bitch.

That’s right. Twenty years after my mother was diagnosed, a bout of mononucleosis brought out my own latent celiac disease. I had a blood test followed by a colonoscopy and then the dreaded down-the-throat-pod-and-tube that confirmed the diagnosis.

I was able to adapt to a gluten free lifestyle fairly quickly thanks to the years of experience my mother had accumulated. I knew what was prohibited and what was OK to eat and while it wasn’t difficult it certainly wasn’t easy either. I’m asymptomatic – meaning I don’t manifest those brutal gastrointestinal problems most celiac suffers have to face – but in some ways that makes it more difficult. I have to rely on my notoriously faulty willpower to sustain the limiting diet and when I screw up I don’t even know it (the damage to my intestine is still done – increasing my risk for colon cancer exponentially).

Celiac disease is a pain in the ass for so many other reasons. It’s not a disease that is scary enough to garner much sympathy nor is it low-key enough that people I know aren’t impacted in some way. I’m “that guy” at a dinner party who has to let the host know that “no no it’s OK… really… I’ll just stick with the salad”. I don’t like to ask waiters if the kitchen uses flour to thicken sauces.  We eat at the same places more often than my wife would prefer and I’m overly conscious of being a burden on her and my friends and my co-workers.

Celiac disease is also one of the only diseases that I know of that, by some trick of the English language, becomes definitional as well. I have celiac disease but I’m also “a Celiac”. I don’t know whose fault this is but I think I’ll blame my mother.