My Last Real Doughnut: The Celiac Realization

In 2010, I had my last real doughnut.

It was an éclair from the Arborg Bakery when my friends and I were in town for a college project. I told them, “Before we leave, we have to stop at the bakery!”

While my friends cooed in doughnut heaven, I drove back to Red River College, scratching my itchy burning hands as they bubbled like pop rocks. 

I couldn’t accept the obvious: I was Celiac.

When one of my aunts was diagnosed in the late 1990s, few people understood Celiac disease. In a nutshell – no gluten. Barley, malt, malt flavour, brewer’s yeast, dextrin. And more! Celiac is a hereditary disease, and it runs on it’s own timeline. It’ll mess with your gluten filled life because of stress or an overload of gluten. After years and years of yummy puffy homemade bread, a body can revolt.

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Hey, You Want a Time Machine – A Chance to Return to High School, Yes or No

“If you could, would you go back to high school?”

Adults are often asked this around graduation season. As social media fills with photos of newly minted graduates, some of you become nostalgic about your own high school experiences.

A time when Hypercolor shirts, Fat Emma & Pie Face Chocolate bars, leggings, bell bottoms, paisley shirts, poodle skirts, mullets, O’Ryan’s Sour Cream and Onion chips, spiral perms, two-centimetres of makeup, and Moon Boots defined your generation. When we were as cool as Cool Ranch Chips and hot as Hot Tamales.

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Let’s be real. We’re still cool and hot, just older with more knowledge – and debt and a Netflix account.

But would you go back to high school?

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It’s Time to Rename “Fad Diets” as “Treatments” – You’re Not on the Real Keto Diet

Meet the keto diet.

However, in the epilepsy community, it’s known as the ketogenic diet and it can be traced back to the 1920s and 1930s.

But, hey, someone said they lost 120 lbs on keto. So, toot, toot! All aboard the temporary weight loss train!

The ketogenic diet is not a diet. It’s a treatment for children and teens with uncontrolled (refractory) epilepsy. In 1994, it gained mainstream attention – as a seizure control treatment – when a young boy with refractory epilepsy was kept seizure free thanks to the ketogenic diet. I live with epilepsy, and I learned about the treatment as a teenager.

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Losing Grandparents Doesn’t Become Simpler with Age

My Gigi Karatchuk died on December 2, 1984 when he was 67 years old, and Baba died at the same age on October 12, 1982. Pictured are my older sister (brown overalls) and me (sucking thumb) with my paternal grandparents, 1980  

“Grandparents are only with us part-time.”

That was the gist of a late-80s MTS commercial.

If grandchildren are fortunate, we’ll have memories of our grandparents – even if we lost them at a young age. However, if our grandparents are still with us in our teen years, or our 20s, 30s, or 40s – we start to believe they are invincible.

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Worship at Home, Not in a Parking Lot – Manitoba isn’t “Attacking Your Religion”

My maternal Baba and Gigi were staunch Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Every Sunday, they used to attend services – referred to as meetings – at the Kingdom Hall. However, my grandparents developed health and mobility issues, making it difficult to drive into Arborg for meetings. The Kingdom Hall solved the problem. My grandparents were provided with a phone with conference call capabilities, and they were able to partake in the meetings from home.

That was in the late-1990s.

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