My French dentist paused midway through her yearly cleaning of my teeth, her gloved fingers in my mouth, and expressed her frowning concern, not about my gums, but about my throat, which was swollen, scratched, and covered in flaming red patches.

My French dermatologist smiled at me agreeably when I told her the steroid creams she had prescribed a year ago weren’t healing me. They treated my symptoms instead of the cause and they thinned my skin. She replied that the chronic condition I’d suffered from since childhood was now worsening with age and offered to prescribe me stronger creams. I burst into tears, exasperated from years of itching, wanting a solution, a cure. She asked me whether I had any friends.

My immune system was overreacting, which meant I was overreacting. Two general practitioners in Paris recommended a daily dose of antihistamines and psyllium seeds.

For years, my American husband lovingly called me Michael Jackson when I slid on my white cotton gloves at night so I wouldn’t mangle myself during sleep. Despite the gloves, I would wake up in the morning between bloodied sheets.

I cut out wine, dust, dairy, shampoo, scented toilet seat cleaner, and evenings out with friends. I failed to cut out failure: I did not find a cause.

One day, I requested minuscule portions of fish and seafood on the biweekly market in our arrondissement, explaining to the mustached fishmonger from Brittany why I needed a sliver of salmon, a sliver of bass, one shrimp, one scallop, and one mussel. After he understood that my French allergist meant to inject pieces of seafood into my skin, the fishmonger insisted on handing me everything I needed for free.

How dogged I was. In the end, I ate nothing but rice, sweet potatoes, lettuce, and olive oil, undernourishing myself rather than eating the wrong thing. Being around me became such fun!

I can still feel the endless itching, the pain of cracked skin, my eyes tearing from inflamed lids.

The problem couldn’t be gluten, the choir of my French doctors sang, because an intolerance to gluten would give me a different type of dermatitis and would cause diarrhea, not constipation. Have you tried drinking more water? Eating more fiber? Swallowing more despair? I silently raged and secretly kept avoiding gluten, because I was dogged and had a hunch, because I sensed that my body was healing even though the evidence had yet to come.

After three months of not eating gluten, my skin began to recover. The eczema disappeared first from my ankles, then the back of my knees, my thighs, my buttocks, my stomach, my breasts, my elbows, my shoulders, my throat. The cure of absence traveled up my body as the year went by, until I was left with only two red patches on my jaws that still come and go depending on my diet, the climate, my stress level, the toxicity of my shampoo, and the proximity of swimmable salt waters. These patches are my badges of honor, proof of my near and therefore total victory.