The Quack, issue 331
The slice of toast edition
Hey, good morning! It’s very nice to see you.
I have a very specific story to tell you this morning. It’s about a single slice of toast that took eight years, five months, and 24 days to make.
Grab a mug from the cupboard. There’s tea in the pot on the table. This yarn’s going to be a long one.
It starts with a book launch
October 5, 2016. I’ve been waiting for this day for a while. This is the launch date for my second book, Cure for Wereduck. This is book two in my Wereduck series, and I still think it’s the best of the three.
I enjoyed writing my first book, but I had no idea what I was doing or if I was even capable of writing a book. Book two was written in a sprint of just a few months, fuelled almost completely by the joy of knowing I had successfully written book one. I remember very well the day my soon-to-be editor Penelope called me to let me know Nimbus was going to publish my first book. I jumped around the house like a bunny for about ten minutes. Then I sat down to start writing book two.
The launch was held at the Confederation Centre Library (which has since moved across the street to its new fabulous home). I stood up to the microphone to give a little talk and read selected passages. The real show at any of these events is the Q&A. As soon as a presentation becomes a conversation between me and the audience, all my nerves go away and I feel like I can really be myself.
Sometime in the middle of the Q&A, I was chatting away when I felt a sudden stab in my lower gut. It was so sharp and painful, it was shocking. It lasted about three seconds. I likely winced (I am a wuss). But it went away quickly, I just kept answering questions.
When I sat down at the end to sign books, it happened again. It lasted longer this time. Maybe ten seconds. And it kept happening. I held it together for the rest of the evening. I have genuinely lovely memories of all the evening: so many friends and readers came out. I am still so grateful.
On the way out the door at the end of the night, I grabbed Erin by the elbow.
“Hey, do you mind driving home?” I asked.
“No problem,” she said. “What’s up?”
I doubled over, the pain was so bad.
“I think there’s something wrong with my guts.”
A hernia? Maybe it’s a hernia.
I didn’t sleep that night. The pain was awful and almost constant. Laying down was out of the question. Sitting wasn’t much better, but it was a bit better, so I spend the night in a chair. By morning, it was clear I needed some help.
I spent that day in the emergency department. The doctor was fairly baffled by the symptoms I was describing. The pain was on my lower left abdomen.
“Here’s the thing about that specific area,” he said. “There’s nothing there. If it was the other side, it could be a couple things. Appendix maybe. But where you’re pointing, there’s just the colon.”
He sent me to X-Ray, and when that showed a little spot he was curious about, he sent me for an MRI.
The MRI didn’t show much more, but there was still a little spot he found intriguing. He gave me a diagnosis and a referral.
“I’m sending you to a surgeon,” he said. “It’s small, but I think that’s a hernia right there.”
“Doesn’t a hernia usually push through the skin?” I said.
“Not always,” he said. “In this case, a bit of the bowel has pushed through the muscles in your abdomen. The surgeon will take care of that.”
I was still in quite a lot of pain, but it sure was nice to put a name to what I was feeling. And now that I thought of it, I had spent an afternoon recently hoisting our kids into trees at the park. It all made a lot of sense.
Except it wasn’t a hernia
(I recently found this cartoon in an old sketchbook. What a drama queen!)
It took a few months to get to the surgeon. The pain wasn’t constant, thank goodness. Some days were much worse than others. I missed some work. I missed some book events.
The surgeon was a very nice older man. He looked at all the imaging. He gave me an exam in his consultation room. He explained the procedure. The surgery would involve cutting me open, pulling the bit of bowel out of the gap in my muscle, and placing a mesh gauze on the tissue to prevent it from happening again.
“I like this surgery,” he said. “It’s really effective. But I’m not going to do it for you.”
I stared at him for a moment.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like to do unnecessary surgery,” he said. “I’m positive you don’t have a hernia.”
All the hope I had for my pain going away whooshed out of my body.
“So what’s wrong with me?” I asked.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I’m a surgeon. I cut people open and fix them. I don’t know what’s causing your pain.”
I left his office feeling awful. Not only could he not fix my problem, I was back to square one. No one knew what was wrong.
I spent the next several months going to many doctors and specialists. No one had any theories. Sometime in mid-2017, a doctor said something about chronic pain and that this might be something I’ll just have to live with for the rest of my life.
I was feeling pretty low. And in all honesty, it really bloody hurt. It was hard on me. It was hard on Erin. I was not the parent I wanted to be. It affected everything.
A few months later, I needed a doctors appointment for something unrelated. I honestly cannot remember what it was. Our family doctor was out of the office, but I was told I could see a nurse practitioner.
Nurse practitioners are superheroes in my book, so I said yes. While we were discussing whatever I was there for, she said, “is anything else bothering you?”
I chuckled darkly.
“Got ten minutes for a story?” I said.
She smiled kindly.
“Of course I do,” she said.
I spun her my whole yarn. She was very sympathetic. She thought a moment.
“Has anyone ever mentioned the possibility of IBS?” she asked.
I had heard of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but I honestly hadn’t even considered it.
“I’m not having any digestive issues,” I said. “Like, I’m not having diarrhea or gas or anything. I just have pain.”
“IBS can just be pain,” she said. “It’s often just abdominal pain.”
I stared at her.
“Why has no one mentioned to me before?” I said.
She looked left and right, as if she was looking around to see if anyone was listening. She answered in a quiet voice.
“Sometimes doctors are weird about IBS,” she said.
No more bread
I won’t go into the deep details of IBS. Some people have sensitive bowels. Certain foods are triggers because they contain a carbohydrate which the small intestines have trouble digesting. When they hit the large intestine, they start to ferment. This causes all sorts of problems, including pain.
I decided to start eliminating foods one at a time to see if there was a single culprit. The first thing I cut was wheat, because it seemed to be a biggie on the list.
The pain went away. Like, gone.
Within a week of cutting bread, I was back to normal. No pain at all. It turned out, I was one of the kabillion people who have trouble digesting gluten.
I went cold turkey. Truly. If I’ve eaten any wheat since the fall of 2017, it was an accident. I haven’t cheated at holidays. I haven’t snuck a cracker to eat with my birthday Cheez Whiz. I just cut it from my life. And it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
Cooked
(This story is getting long, so I’ll try to wrap it up soon. I promise!)
A few weeks ago, Erin and I were watching the Cooked documentary series by Michael Pollan (It’s on Netflix. It’s really good).
In Cooked, Pollan breaks down the human history and relationship with cooking and food through the elemental headings of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. On his episode on Air, he focused on bread.
The documentary touched on a lot of things, but one thing struck me.
Human beings have been eating bread for all of recorded history, and before. That’s thousands and thousands of years. And suddenly, in the last few decades, as many as 1/3 of North Americans are now actively trying to avoid eating it. Specifically gluten.
What if… it’s not wheat’s fault? What if… it’s something we’ve been doing to wheat?
Modern bread is made with refined wheat. A good chunk of the grain has been discarded. And it’s made with instant yeast. That’s not how we made bread for the first 99.99% of its history. Before a hundred years ago, it you ate bread, it was the whole grain. More importantly, it was made through fermentation. It was made with sourdough.
It turns out, a lot of people with gluten insensitivity can eat sourdough bread. I had somehow not heard this. The act of slow fermenting changes the structure of gluten making it easier to digest.
That’s what made bread an innovation in the first place.
Fermenting the grain allows us to get nutrition from wheat we could not access by just chewing a bunch of grain. And it makes it easier for us to digest.
The next day, I bought a bag of whole wheat flour from Speerville Flower Mill in New Brunswick. I measured out some flour and some water into a jar and placed it under a towel on top of my fridge. Every day, I fed my baby sourdough starter. By the third day it started to bubble and froth. By day five, it was smelling sour. I knew I could start using it on day seven.
Except… on day seven, it looked dead. All the bubbles were gone. I was pretty frustrated.
I tried to nurse it back to life for a few days. I called around to friends to see if anyone had a healthy starter I could borrow. I made arrangements to grab some from our friend Shannon for the next day.
My own sourdough starter must have heard me making these arrangements, because by the next morning, it had sprung back to bubbly life. I was so excited, I fed it a bit more, and picked out a recipe to start baking.
It lives!
Helloooooo bread.
I started making it Thursday. I used the stretch and fold technique instead of kneading, which meant I had to hop up from my desk every fifteen minutes to give it a bit of attention… which was fun to do anyway.
The long fermentation was finished by 2 pm Friday, so I threw it in a dutch oven and cranked the stove up to 500 degrees. The result was a pretty little boule of 100% whole wheat bread.
My intention all along was to make this bread and have a single slice to see how my body reacted. I haven’t eaten a slice of proper wheat toast since 2017, so I needed this one to count.
Hell yes. Eight years, five months, and 24 days in the making, I finally got my toast. I topped it with some lovely, crumbly blue cheese, tomato, and coarse salt.
It was heavenly. So sour. So chewy. So wheaty.
Even if this experiment fails, that piece of toast was worth it.
That was Friday night. I felt good all day yesterday. I feel good this morning. The real pain can sometimes take two to three days to hit my guts, so I am still cautious. I have not declared victory just yet.
But…
I also just fed my sourdough starter to start making my next loaf. It’ll come out of the oven tomorrow around lunchtime. We live in hope.
OK, that was way longer than I’d planned, so thanks for sticking through to the end.
Thank you to the members of my Patreon. I’ve said it before, but y’all are the wind beneath my wings. Thank you for your support.
Have a great week.