It’s not hard to remember him laying on the floor in the living room because it was the place he found that was most comfortable during these episodes. It was the late 1970s and my father was in the throes of one of his almost-weekly migraine headaches.
It’s strange how certain images embed themselves so solidly in our memory while others are fuzzy or non-existent. Even though it is easy for me to remember my father suffering there on our living room carpet, I cannot recall when it all started. I strongly suspect, however, that it started in his early 40s much the way it did for me some two decades later.
I was lucky. The headaches I started to experience after I turned 40 were not as bad as my father’s migraines and for that I was grateful and remain so today. My father’s headaches were a complete mystery at the time. Doctors were unable to help him and could only offer prescriptions for pain killers and muscle relaxants.
What was particularly strange about his ordeal was that his headaches would always occur on the weekends and almost always on Sunday afternoon. During the workweek he was perfectly fine and then he would often develop a migraine on Sunday. One might expect that it could be the result of stress that accumulated during the week and then took its toll on the weekends. That seems like a perfectly plausible theory particularly for someone who also suffered from anxiety that would probably be referred to as “General Anxiety Disorder” these days but stress and anxiety was not the cause.
It was probably a decade or so later when he finally learned what the cause was. One day he received a phone call from his brother. I did not know it before that but my uncle also suffered with those unexplained headaches. When he figured what the actual cause was, he called my father to share that breakthrough with him. The true cause was gluten.
Today I would not be totally surprised if a doctor could correctly diagnose that condition since food sensitivities and allergies are better understood compared to the way things were in the 1970s.
Once my father learned that his problems were caused by consuming foods that contained gluten it was a lot easier to understand what had happened. My father ate more than his share of bread during a typical week and making matters worse, breakfast cereal was just about a daily habit in my family. Both “Shredded Wheat” and “Wheaties” were not often absent from our kitchen cabinets and may as well have been Kryptonite for my father. Why he only experienced migraines on weekends after a week of consuming gluten is a mystery that was never solved.
Other things also started to make more sense following this discovery. My father had recalled his own father downing hefty doses of aspirin quite frequently while he was growing up and that was almost certainly due to headaches his father suffered from for the same reason. The genetic lottery awarded both himself and one of his six brothers with the same gene that caused gluten sensitivity and a few decades later it would be passed on to me.
The advantage I enjoyed was that I knew it might be coming and what the cause would be if it did. While I cannot pinpoint it with perfect accuracy, I knew it started for me when I was in my early 40s. It began as a gluten sensitivity similar to my father’s in some ways but with significant differences as well.
I did not get headaches only on weekend days. My body would react to gluten consumption much faster and I would often feel the early signs of headache development even before I was finished eating whatever it was that caused it.
As I mentioned earlier, my headaches were not severe enough to be classified as migraines but were still not pleasant to deal with. In almost cases, the headaches would last for the remainder of the day and be absent when I woke up the next day.
Since my headaches were not as severe, I mostly just endured them without taking anything to kill the pain. My father had developed the habit of taking Ibuprofen pretty regularly for his migraines and they did help but in the long run I think that taking them as frequently as he did contributed to the kidney failure that took his life after a bout with sepsis in 2011. I do not think it is a coincidence that his father also died of kidney failure at the age of 76 after chugging aspirin for decades. My father was 77 years old when he died some 40 years later.
Since I knew what the cause for my headaches when they started, it was so much easier for me to deal with them. I avoided gluten and that completely solved the problem. Being human, there were times when I was unable to resist that fresh-baked bread, cookies or other gluten-containing treat and would invariably end up with a headache. I would ride it out most of the time, taking some Ibuprofen only once in a while when the headache was worse than usual or I just was not in the mood to put up with it. It worked virtually every time and would completely extinguish the pain within an hour or so.
I was not aware of any actual name for the condition that plagued my father, uncle and grandfather so we just called it a “gluten allergy” or “gluten sensitivity.” Although I am grateful that so many gluten-free options became available in recent years, I admit I would sometimes feel a little silly ordering something that was gluten-free since doing so seemed to be associated more with something “trendy” than an actual requirement like it was for me and many others.
Being unable to eat anything containing gluten was disappointing after being able to do it my entire life up to that point without any consequences but I surely was grateful that I knew what the cause was. Thanks to my uncle’s discovery I knew what to do to avoid the headaches that baffled him for a good portion of his life. But my situation would soon become even more complicated and present yet another mystery to be solved.
I realize this type of content is a bit of a departure from what I usually include here but since I wanted to share this information as widely as possible, I determined that Substack was probably the best place for it. I want others who are dealing with a similar condition to learn about a potential solution to their problem that does not involve pharmaceuticals. For me it has been a complete and total cure, and I do not use that word lightly. I suspect it could greatly benefit others as well.