When You've Had a Reaction — But Haven't Been Glutened

Let's not jump to conclusions

If you keep up with celiac news, you’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of lawsuits about people getting “glutened” these days. One man actually sued a Las Vegas restaurant for $100,000 for allegedly glutening him. The Dutch airline KLM was accused of glutening a passenger, who became violently ill and had to be carried off the plane on a stretcher. (Curiously this passenger’s symptoms sound *exactly* like mine the time I got violently ill on a transatlantic flight — only it wasn’t from being glutened, it was from getting slammed by the norovirus. UGH.)

Obviously, restaurants and airlines make mistakes. But when you have a medical condition that you need to be vigilant about, it can feel like the natural explanation for anything that goes wrong. I empathize with this, because I’ve been there myself. A few years after I was diagnosed with celiac disease, while I was away at a crime-fiction conference, I had a horrible reaction after eating a salad for lunch. I didn’t immediately think I’d been glutened, because red, itchy hives erupted all over my skin. That had never happened before, pre-diagnosis, so it wasn’t a symptom I associated with celiac. My reaction to gluten has always included ulcers in my mouth and throat, and that didn’t happen this time around. But even after taking several doses of Benadryl, the hives didn’t go away, though they did vanish by the time I got back to New York.