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     When I wrote asking if others had experienced increasingly severe
symptoms after accidentally ingesting gluten, I had no idea the
response would be so overwhelming. I received 48 messages, all of them
providing insight and comfort. Dare I say it? Misery loves company,
but it's even better when the company is full of encouraging stories
of how CD actually does get better with time, or at least how the diet
becomes easier to deal with. Thank you all so much - you are all
wonderful help. Mary in NYC
     To summarize:
     The response was almost unanimous. Only three people said they
had not noticed much of a change. The rest all had the same
experience, with variations: Symptoms do get dramatically worse once
you go on a GF diet. Almost everybody had horror stories, of brutal
reactions from a TCBY yogurt ... from a jelly bean...from a few
crumbs, all things that before going on the diet would barely have
caused a mild reaction.
    There were several explanations for this, all of which made sense.
Even though ours is a gluten intolerance and not, in the great
majority of cases, a true food allergy, our bodies may react in a
similar manner. As long as you eat gluten, even though it's making you
sick, your body is still mounting some sort of defense against it.
Once you go on the diet, and the "enemy" vanishes for a while, your
body forgets about the defense. The result is that when gluten is
ingested, the body reacts with great outrage. Sounds logical to me.
     Although most people said they had continued to experience great
sensitivity to gluten as the years went by, about a quarter of those
who responded had encouraging reports. They said that after a long
period of increasingly severe symptoms, they reached a plateau and
then began to notice that the severity of the reactions tapered off.
The whole process from worse to plateau to less severe took anywhere
from nine months to several years. But again, not everybody was so
lucky.
     I was interested in hearing from several people who spoke of
mental reactions, ranging from "short bouts of deep sadness'"
attributed to disappointment at inadvertently falling off the diet, to
"fuzzymindedness," outbursts of temper, and attacks of unreasonable
anger. In my case, a tidal wave of black depression washed over me,
along with a general hatred towards the world. I did the only thing
possible, and took to my bed for two days - I really was not fit to be
around people. What is interesting is that many had the same
experience I did: that these reactions lasted longer that the physical
ones, and took at least several days to disappear.
     A useful tip from one woman in NYC. Always carry some Metamucil.
A rounded teaspoonful taken at the first symptom helps considerably to
lessen the severity and duration of the reaction.