Celia- What Now?

I don't know if this is the appropriate outlet for this subject- but I'm not really sure where else to put it.  So for those of you that check this merely for the pictures and stories about the kids- please skip this.  This is more of a post/ journal entry for me.  

For those of you that talk to me regularly, know that I have been feeling sick for a long time now.  I teased my family about calling in sick on our moving day so that I could get out of moving all of our crap- but it turned out to be true.  I still moved everything- but it wasn't without some serious effort.  I can remember going to my Dr about three months after Kate was born and complaining about how tired I was and how crappy I felt.  He chalked it up to having a newborn and had my thyroid tested- but when the test came back clean, he just told me to bear with it and eventually it would get better.  Days, weeks and months went by and I still didn't feel any better- if anything, I started feeling worse.  The fatigue got the the point that doing anything required major effort.  I got sick every time I ate anything.  And anything that I did eat, exited quicker than slick shit through a tall Sweed.  

Once we moved to Salt Lake- I felt as though I could make one more last ditch effort to see if there was something else wrong before our good health insurance ended.  I scheduled a Dr's appointment on Thursday and went in and told him everything.  He told me he was going to try a few more obscure blood tests to see if his hunch was right...  When I got a phone call from the lab, they told me that the tests came back "abnormal" for celiac disease, and that I needed to schedule an Endoscopy ASAP in order to confirm.  Well, I scheduled said Endoscopy for the next Wednesday, and did all the reading I could on celiac disease.  It didn't sound like anything I wanted- so I hoped that the scope would show nothing abnormal and maybe they could diagnose something that the drs could fix.  

I don't know if any of you have an Endoscopy- but I can think of a lot of things I would rather do with my morning.  I had to lay down on a bed, while the dr put a long tube down my throat, down my esophagus and into my stomach, where he took pictures and took a few samples to biopsy.  The dr sat me down afterward and showed me the pictures.  There was extensive damage and he told me that it was indeed celiac disease.  

Celiac disease is an auto-immune disease where your body cannot digest gluten properly.  Gluten can be found in wheat, barley and malt... and is unfortunately in most things that we eat nowadays- either through the wheat itself, or because our food is processed in plants that also process foods that contain wheat.  Either way- the result is the same- I can't eat any of it now.  The dr told me that this should be one of the best days of my life because this diagnosis would free me, and I would feel better than I had in years.   I had a hard time agreeing with him because I was having a hard time trying to grasp what this all meant for me and for my family.  Surely it wasn't going to be easy.  

I asked the dr what caused celiac, and he told me that it was because I had the gene.  It's hereditary apparently. But- a lot of people will go through life and the gene will never trigger and these people will never have a problem with gluten.  But for some of us- the gene gets triggered (the most common triggers are severe emotional distress and pregnancy- which when I trace my symptoms back- they started right after Ryan's accident- so it was either that and/or the pregnancy we think), and we then begin a new kind of lifestyle... a gluten free one.   I actually feel kind of lucky though- for most people- it takes about 10 years to get a correct diagnosis because of the nature of the disease and its symptoms, for me, it was only about a year and a half.  

I'm not excited about my new lifestyle... but maybe I will be.  Maybe one day, I will feel blessed that I was diagnosed and I will feel better.  For now- I'm so terrified of eating the wrong thing- a lot of the time I just don't eat- so hunger pains have become my constant companions.  I'm sure it will get easier with time, I only need to learn better what I can and cannot have.  I pray that it will get easier and I am grateful for the resources that are available to me... Thank goodness for the internet!!!  I'm sure I'll use this blog as a journal again in the future, so that I can remind myself of where I started, and hopefully- see how far I've come.