Last night I tried an experiment. I took a knock-off Benadryl 20 minutes before eating a cinnamon roll (brought to me from one of my fave bakeries in Vancouver!) and it worked! No nausea, no cramping, no itching. However, the reason I have this knock-off brand of Benadryl is that a pharmacist recommended I buy it instead of sleeping pills since they have the same active ingredient, but it was cheaper. So it knocked me out and made me drag-ass for most of the day today.
I have a freezer full of Canadian pastries. I refuse to let them go to waste.

Today at Whole Foods, I bought brown rice bagels and english muffins. That was after searching on yelp for gluten-free bagels and finding that the one place that bakes them fresh (maybe) was going to be closed by the time I was done with work.

Later, I looked over these 2 posts from Gluten-Free Girl.

I’m going to lunch with my cousin at some burger place tomorrow and I find myself searching the website to see if they, on the off-chance, have a wheat-free bun. (They don’t.) And then wondering about their condiments and whether wheat is in any of them.

I watched an amazing video and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “How many of those things could I have?”

This is exhausting and frustrating.

It’s my job now to figure out all those flours and starches and which ones I like in which proportion so that my skin doesn’t look like a battlefield, so that my lungs don’t need steroids to expand and contract like they’re supposed to, so that I don’t get painfully nauseous, so that my mood and energy level stay stable; I have to be one of those people who asks the waiter to check the bottle of ketchup to see if it has natural flavors in it; I have to miss the Korean BBQ cook-off because soy sauce has wheat in it; I have to be hyper-vigilant about everything–just, so that I can be normal.

I know that it will pass, but I just feel a little defeated right now.