Austin Milner
In Search of Lost Time
Turning Point Essay
The Three-Month Long “Cold”
In the late summer of 2012, just after returning from a summer camp that I was a counselor at, I caught a cold. It was nothing to out of the ordinary, with the usual coughing and running nose, so my mother and I addressed the illness as usual, with a movie marathon, a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and a handful of saltine crackers. I admit, it was unusual for me to catch a cold in the summer season but I had assumed that I had gotten it from a camper that I worked with or something of that nature. In the early fall of 2012, anxiously on my way to my first day of my senior year of high school, I still had that cold.
I had quite the line-up of classes, projects, events and goals to conquer during my first semester of that senior year and was not about to let some silly cold get in the way of what the world had explained to me as the most important and enjoyable time in my life. I had just started dating someone and was in the process of founding a theatre club for my school and discovering a passion for writing. Missing school and social interactions didn’t seem worth it to me, even if it meant that my sickness would linger a tad longer but when my sickness refused to subside in the weeks to come, my mother decided to take me to the doctor’s office. “It’s just that time of year”, he said. We reassured him that a sickness lasting for about a month now was indeed out of the ordinary but this didn’t seem to change his diagnoses that I just had that seasonal fall cold. So we went home, I ate my chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers, finished up my 8-season marathon of Weeds and continued on with my “cold”.
It quickly became apparent to me that my sickness was getting worse. It seemed like every day in October added another symptom and, in addition to coughing and having a runny nose, I now was experiencing cold sweats, constantly fluctuating in body temperature, losing weight, feeling weak and had daily asthma attacks (I did not have asthma before the sickness began). I was unable to go to school. I rarely saw my friends. I became too depressed to write and I continued to eat chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers while binge watching shows on Netflix. The fun of a day off from school because I was sick was gone and every visit to the doctor’s office yielded the same response. I remember one day in particular, when I drove to school after finally getting my driver’s license on my eighteenth birthday and parked on a hill above the UW campus in downtown Tacoma. As I was walking to my statistics class I began to feel incredibly weak and collapsed onto the sidewalk. I deduced that I was unable to walk down to my class, let alone pay attention to my teacher’s lesson and then walk back up the hill to my car at the end of the day. So I got back on my feet and walked up the brief incline to my car and started it up but before I could put the car in drive I experience yet another asthma attack, not my first of the day and it was still morning, and was unable to breath for the next minute and a half. As I watched the minute on my cars cassette tape clock change I believed that I was going to die. Here in my car, without an inhaler for help because the doctor never prescribed one to me, I managed to take another breath. I put the car in drive and made my way back to my parent’s house to tell them that something was seriously wrong and that I needed to go to the doctors yet again.
We got the same response from the doctor, though this time with a little more concern because it was late October and I’d been sick since August. My mother and I decided at this point to see a naturopath near our home, giving up all hope on our usual doctor (I have not gone to see him since). We visited the naturopath for the first time near Halloween of that year and I was weighed at 105 lbs. We took a blood test and found out that I was severely allergic to gluten. The more gluten I ate the worse my immune system became and the harder it was for my to properly digest my food. The chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers turned out to be the culprit all along. Over the course of the next seven months I was able to finish my schooling on a high note, even accidently being awarded honors at Stadium High School (a school that I had attended for my freshman year only) and gained most of my weight back. I was glad for a happy ending to this chapter of my life but I felt foolish all the same. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t make any active effort to change how I was feeling.
In realizing that I had been living with an illness for three months when I could have prevented it with a simple blood test or some deductive reasoning I learned that I wasn’t really taking care of myself and that I was putting my goals in front of my health. I had a habit of letting things build up until I would be forced to deal with them. I needed to change the way that I interacted with the world and how I reacted to the things that were in my life, whether it be an allergy to gluten or how to balance my hobbies with school and work. I was becoming an adult and would be heading to college soon and would have even more things to juggle.
This realization is universal I am sure but the way that I came about it with my turning point caused me to go into the beginnings of my adult life with more caution and forethought. I don’t know if this is the best way that I could have started off my independent journey but I can surely say that gluten is the culprit for how I’ve shaped myself, for better or for worse.