Long Day

[Clodfobble]

I've been saying for years that we need to get the stepkids tested for celiac. My stepdaughter is diagnosed ADD and severe social anxiety, with additional symptoms not yet categorized, but in the words of her psychiatrist, "heading for a major personality disorder." Meanwhile the stepson is a classic picture of Asperger's, but his mom isn't interested in getting him evaluated at all, even though his OCD is debilitating at times, because she's afraid he'll just end up on a cocktail of meds like his sister. Of course they already eat gluten free at our house, and we only see a small fraction of the symptoms their mom complains about, except on the days when they've just come over (part of which is also just due to better parenting, but still.) Getting them tested would only be for the purpose of convincing their mother that this was a real and necessary thing for them.

So finally, I did it. The kids understood what we were testing for, and every night since the blood draw my stepson added a fervent "and please don't let me have celiac" to his nightly prayers. He's the picky eater who does just fine at our house, eagerly asks for more veggies, but has his mom completely snowed, eating almost nothing but chicken nuggets and fish sticks when he's with her.

Unfortunately for him, God didn't listen. The nurse called this morning to let us know that the stepdaughter has IgG antibodies but not IgA, meaning intolerance but not full-blown celiac, while stepson is sky high in all four metrics, a guaranteed case of the disease. We broke it to them gently, but he still sobbed for an hour. After that, I had to have the phone conversation with their mother. She knew that we had done the test, and results were imminent, but she still didn't take the news well. You could tell she really wanted to blame me for this upheaval in her life, even though I obviously didn't give it to him, and possibly even saved him from an early death of colon cancer. She kept saying, "I'll deal with this when I deal with it, and don't expect that to be anytime soon..."

I think she'll come around sooner than she thinks, because she's always been one for martyrdom, and this is one more way she can show everyone how hard her life is. And if she doesn't, hey, maybe Mr. Clod will make a new push for custody, if she's refusing to treat a documented medical disease. That's not really an ideal scenario in my mind, but regardless of what she thinks my motives are, I do genuinely care about these children and their health. I won't pretend (to you guys, anyway,) that I'm sad about the results, but that's only because we already knew how much better they both do on the diet, and now we have the justification to force the issue.