On the other hand, this year California's glyphosate ban has given me a feeling I've never had before, a sense of some emotional connection or at least respect for the place where I was, more or less by accident, born. (I'm the proud heir of an old Virginia family and an old North Carolina family, who happened to be born while my parents were in Los Angeles.)
The effects of glyphosate pollution on celiacs are really hard to believe, unless and until you've seen them, because they vary according to amount of exposure (yes, they build up over time) and also according to the form of a specific minority gene real celiacs have. But they're horrific.
I say, "I was sick over the weekend...food poisoning," and you picture me sprinting to the bathroom, which I did, but you probably don't want to know what I saw there that made this kind of food poisoning so special. It wasn't even the blood-flecked froth that defines celiac sprue, or it wasn't only that. It was that, during one bolt to an oldfashioned water-flush toilet, I saw a two-or-three-inch-long strip swirling slowly around. Strip of what? It looked like honeycomb tripe. No, I had not inadvertently swallowed a strip of blanched undercooked meat as long as my finger. I've never eaten honeycomb tripe. We are talking about my own body tissues here.
If somebody had come up and torn that amount of skin off my arm, would there be any question about that person needing to serve time in prison? I hope not.
Somebody came up and tore it off my colon, where the damage was much worse, and because they tore the strip off my body in an indirect way that person probably thinks he or she was being nice. Instead of expecting jail time for tearing a strip off me, the person expects me to return a favor, and has no idea what kind of favor I actually owe him or her.
I say "he or she" because multiple suspects may have contributed to this poisoning.
People in the point of Virginia are going around asking each other, "How are your cucumbers doing this summer? What about your zucchini? Bell peppers? Tomatoes?"--and if the answer is anything but "I've never had such a crop! From only three or four plants, more produce than I have any idea what to do with!" then the speaker's next line is probably going to be, "Can you use a few extra? I just happen to have a bag or two to get rid of...can you eat them, can them, sell them...?"
This weekend I sent someone a text message to the effect that I was too sick to haul the laptop to the nearest McDonalds, myself, and wanted to join a car pool. An hour or two later I saw the vehicle I expected to be told to run out and meet, not waiting beside the main road, but chugging up past my door.
"I'm glad you got the message! When you didn't answer, I thought the text message might have been lost in the humidity! Hang on while I pack up the laptop..."
"Message? Laptop? I just came up to see if you could use some cucumbers."
Most years, people at least try to sell their surplus vegetables. This year, they thrust them upon the unwary, leave them on people's porches overnight and run...
Anyway I've enjoyed many good salads this month, free of charge, and I'm pretty sure the cucumbers weren't what made me sick. The zucchini and squash weren't, because nobody has eaten any of them yet; summer squash tend not to be eaten when vine-ripened cucumbers, tomatoes, and bell peppers are on the table. Tomatoes have thin peels, although I do peel them. Bell peppers, which are practically impossible to peel until they're what I call overcooked, are the prime suspects.
I received one red bell pepper, one green one, and one at the halfway point between green and red. I enjoy the crunch of a bell pepper in a salad with cucumbers and tomatoes so I decided to eat the ripest one, the red one, first. Who wants to cook a fresh bell pepper? Rinse it off, slice it up, and enjoy it! I enjoyed it on Thursday afternoon.
So then on Friday morning I started to feel droopy and grumpy in the market, on Friday afternoon I started running in and out of the bathroom all day, Saturday was more of the same, and by Sunday I was completely enervated and afraid to risk walking three miles. By Monday I felt better, but not well. When celiac sprue reaches the point where large unmistakable bits of tissue start peeling away from the bleeding ulcers, patients are advised to expect it to be a year or so before they can be considered well.
I didn't eat anything that contained any wheat gluten, or corn, or soy. Last week I ate mostly garden-fresh vegetables...some of which somebody had obviously "protected" with Monsanto's Roundup, which some poor fools still want to believe is nontoxic to humans. Hah. The names chemists give chemicals do have some meaning. Glyphosate begins with GL because it's chemically related to gluten, which is what causes celiac sprue; glyphosate affects celiacs the same way gluten does only much moreso.
It has other effects on other people. The family from whom the bell peppers came consider themselves more English than Irish, although one of their children has some form of gluten sensitivity too, and five'll get you ten that, if the truth were known, that this family have been systematically poisoning their own child without knowing it.
Sick days? Meh. Whether or not I'd call a day a sick day depends on what else I might need to do with it. If I had to work with food, or children, or medically fragile patients, a summer cold would be a valid reason for taking a sick day even though I'd still be fit to do physical labor. Since I don't...Sunday was not a sick day. I sat up and wrote, stood up and walked around, picked the hibiscus caterpillars off Mother's Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus). I was fit to work, and I did work; I just wasn't fit to be more than, say, five hundred yards from a toilet.
What it's like, emotionally...the best word is "weird." In real life people do not go around just flushing chunks of their bodies down the toilet for very long. That experience definitely gives a person reasons to think about the end of their present lifetime, and when and how to arrange a quick end rather than a lingering one...but it has nothing to do with "depressive" emotions. The absence of a "depressed" mood, plus the short duration of the acute sprue, are evidence that (so far) it's just a celiac reaction, not cancer. I actually think that, if I don't have long to enjoy being alive, it'd be stupid not to enjoy being alive as much and as long as possible.
I came online and read a post by a rich White male celebrity this morning...the world is his oyster, but he feels depressed, boohoohoo. Boohoo bloomin' hoo! I have very little sympathy for depressive people--except that their moods, too, may be associated with sensitivities to toxic chemicals.
"All this world has turned against me! Nothing but trouble do I see!
There will be no more pleasure in this whole wide world for me!"
If you catch yourself actually relating to the mood of songs like that, you might want to try thinking beyond the end of your nose, right? Think about people who have reality problems. Join us. You might want to consider working toward a nationwide, preferably worldwide, ban on glyphosate.
Consider working toward a ban on poisons, generally. Also this morning I read that Alan Alda now has Parkinson's Disease. Studies have shown that that, too, has a pretty solid correlation with exposure to "pesticides"--specific chemicals weren't studied separately in the studies I saw. If you like, or admire, or have fond memories of Alan Alda (and who doesn't?), consider working against the whole idiotic idea of poisoning the whole environment because there's some animal or plant you don't like.
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