Right, let's start off with caveats. I'm probably not going to give you any new blogs wot my brain wrote because from today until Monday I will be drinking with D, drinking with D, being hungover and having an endoscopy, because I have a suspected gluten intolerance/ coeliac's disease. I certainly hope it's that, because otherwise it's something potentially more killy. Having said that, it is a bit of a setback. It means that as a rule I can't eat pasta or bread or cake or battered cod or samosas or biscuits or pies or soy sauce or cereals or most sauces or oats or french fries (I just found this one out. Not such a biggy, they're just Liberace chips). I also cannot drink beer. I rationalise this and consider what I can have, which is meat and fish, fruit and veg, rice and eggies. I can also have Free From products, a token area of such limited space that it makes this particular coeliac disease sufferer miserable. Still, I should look on the bright side. It's probably for the best that they don't have much food, because what they have tends to be bloody awful. That, or they're offering free from products like baked beans at extortionate sums when you could buy Heinz baked beans for much cheaper and they don't have gluten or flour in anyway. But it's not that bad. However, if I was unable to have even one of the holy trinity of spuds, rice or meat I would have to go and kill someone. Probably Hugh Dallas. Anyway, I say I can't have these products, but I can. It'll just mean I'll feel rather nauseous and tired because of my inability to process all food properties and that the lining of my oesophagus will be irreparably eaten away by excess stomach acid. Still, I should be grateful. In some people the symptoms include a tendency to shit oneself.
It's actually a quasi interesting story as to how I found out that I (probably) have coeliac's. I'd got blood tests done because I wasn't feeling right and then rung up my GP for the results and he said they were all clear. Then when I popped off to Colchester to the neurologist, he told me that the symptoms of smelling burnt toast and having "auras" was nothing to do with my coeliac's disease.
"My what, sorry?"
"Your gluten intolerance, that's irrelevant to this."
"Hold the fucking phone a second, Mr Brain Doctor, I want to clear something up here. I'm allergic to gluten?"
"Er, that's what your bloodwork indicates, yes."
"Well that's a bit of a shitter isn't it? They told me the tests were negative. I am slightly vexed because someone, as you say in the medical business, has fucked up royally."
"You should feel lucky, there are thousands of people out there who don't know they have coeliac's."
"Those people are vomiting and shitting themselves constantly and haven't the intelligence required to call the doctor to tell them that they think something's wrong because they are vomiting and shitting themselves constantly. So you're saying I should feel lucky because there are a bunch of other people suffering from this but they're not diagnosed because they're FUCKHEADS?!?"
"I'm not sure I like your tone, sir. I certainly don't like the way you've picked up that lancet and taken that nurse hostage."
"What's the worst I could do with it, give her a paper cut? It's a fucking magazine!"
"That's a clever bit of wordplay sir, I bet if you ever came to write about this it would be a bit self indulgent to include it. Not enough people would get it without having to look it up."
"Regardless of how much my future writing is a masturbatory aid, the point remains that I'm a little peeved you're telling me I should be grateful that I'm diseased when the NHS SPECIFICALLY told me I wasn't."
So anyway, won't be writing on Monday because I will be sedated up to the tits whilst having a camera inserted down my gullet into my duodenum, where they will cut bits out of me for analysis. I hope it's down my gullet, anyway. I don't think there'd be enough sedatives in the world if they went via a different route...
*EDIT After someone researched it for me, I found out that Coeliac's can actually cause the symptoms I've been having and that it's not uncommon for the effects to be neurological. The epilepsy medication may have had no effect because I may not have epilepsy, and I may have been getting better because I've cut gluten out of my diet at exactly the same time as I started pill popping Lamotrigine. But it can't be that it's a gluten intolerance that caused all of this. After all, a specialist told me it wasn't JUST BY LOOKING AT ME.
Today's Tune
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