I’ve been gluten-free/dairy-free for….four years? Five? Something like that. I would not suggest you quit both dairy and gluten cold turkey in one day, but that’s just how I roll. Here’s an interesting fact about testing for celiac–you have to actually be eating gluten for six weeks in order to be tested. I asked my doctor about it years after I had gone GF. She said I had to get back on the gluten–and there was no way I was doing that. I decided that me knowing I could not eat gluten without an official diagnosis was good enough for me. To be clear, I don’t think I have celiac because–huh. Wait. I’m reading a list of symptoms and excessive diarrhea (sorry) is one of them. So are cramping and bloating.
I thought it had to be even more severe than that. Oh, there are other things that happen with celiac that doesn’t with gluten intolerance, but I don’t know which I have. More to the point, I’m not going to go back on gluten to get tested. I do fine with just avoiding gluten, so I might as well just do that.
The one restaurant on DoorDash that has GF and/or DF labeled is an Indian restaurant. Their curry is nothing to write home about, but their chicken pakora is great. And they opened another restaurant that has idli and vada, both of which are tasty. However, the last order I got caused me to sit on the toilet, on and off, for seven hours last night. I know it’s the chicken pakora, and it has to be cross-contamination. I always order two portions of it. The first day I ate it, it was a mild burn, but no big deal, so I figured it was just a trace contamination.
The second day (yesterday), however, it was a completely different story. Maybe I ate from the second container? At any rate, I felt it immediately and I was running to the bathroom every fifteen to twenty minutes. And, not to be too graphic (but I’m going to be, anyway), but I was shitting my brains out. I didn’t think I had that much excrement in me.
The last time I accidentally ate gluten was when I wasn’t paying attention at the grocery store. I bought regular macaroni rather than the gluten-free version. Then spent six hours on the toilet (on and off in fifteen minute increments).
This time, it was seven hours, but each episode wasn’t as bad as it was with the macaroni. Which, in a weird way is even more irritating. Here me out. When each episode is big, at least it’s its own thing. When it’s run to the toilet every fifteen minutes for a minute, that’s not enough time to be meaningul, but then it’s hard to get back into whatever I was doing.
The sad part is that now I can’t order from this restaurant any longer. I’m sure some people would say to call the restaurant, but nope. Trust is gone. Eevn if they reassured me that this would never happen again, I would not trust them to hold to that.