My Celiac Story

I guess the big question is: what's my personal Celiac story? Without getting too into detail, I want to start off at the moment I realized there was something off with my stomach.

Around 4 years ago, I started to get a really bad case of acid reflux that seemed to come out of nowhere. On my 18th birthday, after eating dinner with my friends, I had to go home because it just felt like there was a storm seriously brewing inside my belly. This went on and off for the entire summer but I went through a phase where I literally couldn't eat and I ended up losing 10 pounds in 2 weeks.

When I entered college, I managed to keep my tummy issues under wraps but every couple months I would go to our student health center, primarily complaining about my acid reflux. For 2 years, I was constantly prescribed medicine for my acid reflux that never helped.

Completely fed up with how disgusting I felt almost all the time, I went to a stomach doctor that eventually performed an upper endoscopy on me and finally diagnosed me correctly. Now, almost a year later, I am still adjusting to this new lifestyle. Skeptical at first, now I know the effect that gluten can have on my body and did have on my body for 2 and a half years without me even knowing it.

I am the only person in my family that possesses Celiac, which is odd because this is a highly genetic disease. Sadly, I fear that my future children are susceptible to it too :(

There are many reasons why I have put the time and effort into making my blog but the main reason is just to spread awareness to everyone in general so people realize it can happen to anyone.

Celiac: From the Beginning

Some people are born with it (and no, it's not Maybelline) , while other people obtain it later on in their life and have to suffer silently until diagnosed probably years after the symptoms first appeared.This is the cycle of probably many illnesses or diseases but the one I will be focusing on in my blogs is: Celiac Disease.

At this very moment there are at least 3 million people probably sitting on the toilet, all in pain, unaware that there is a solution to the crappy (pun intended) feeling they get after eating almost every meal of thier life. Because Celiac Disease has so many symptoms and is a newer disease to the world, doctors don't think to test people of Celiac as often as they should.

Long story short, Celiac Disease is when the body can't digest wheat, barley, or rye. There are people who are gluten intolerant but that isn't as serious as Celiac.

There are symptoms of Celiac that I didn't know about until after I was experiencing the absense of them. Just from my experience since I've been gluten free for the past year, here are a list of symptoms gluten made my body possess: ~irritable bowel syndrome
~acid reflux
~acne
~sinusitis all the time
~nausea

Though I know I've been vague throughout this blog, there is just too much to say in 1 of them. Next time, I will talk about my personal experience of how I finally got diagnosed. I will end this blog with a link to a video that explains way more acturately than I can what it means to have Celiac Disease. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4v-9U8GbLu0