My Own Personal Awareness Campaign

[teebs in WV]

I am finishing my Bachelor's Degree and just have a few more classes left (yippee!). I put off Public Speaking because like many people, I have never been comfortable speaking in front of a group of people. I just had my last class today and thought I would share my experience with you.

We had to do three speeches - a demonstration, an informative, and a persuasive speech. For my demonstration speech, I showed the class how to make gluten-free peanut butter cookies. They were very curious about my diet. I gave them a little information on Celiac Disease, but not alot since the speech was to be focused on how to do something.

Naturally, when time came to do my informative speech, I decided that I had to select Celiac Disease as my topic. The class is adults ranging from mid-twenties to sixty and they were very interested in hearing about it. Even after I was finished some of them came over to me to ask more questions and talk about it a little more.

Each morning someone would bring something to eat, and of course there was never anything there that I could enjoy. This morning, our last day, one of the women baked cupcakes for the class. The amazing thing was that she also made some candy that she made sure was gluten-free so I could have something to eat also.

I was very touched by this gesture, and even more amazing to me, as I was about to put the candy in my mouth, my professor tried to stop me - she asked if I was sure that it was OK for me to eat!

I know this is a little long, but I really wanted to share this with all of you. I think the more that all of us can try to educate our families, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, we will find our world to be a much better place for Celiacs to live!

Tracy

[Corkdarrr]

That's awesome!

I wish I'd been diagnosed last semester when I had speech class, because I would've done the same thing. A captive audience to listen to me prattle on about celiacs? Awesome!

I'm a big advocate of getting the word out there - I think it's a step in the right direction just for people to have heard that such a thing exists.

Kudos to you!

Courtney