Diagnosis

Several years ago, in early 2011, I discovered that I had Celiac disease.  I later learned that I’ve had the symptoms all my life but didn’t know they were related or what was causing them.  I’ve had lots of doctors prescribe me lots of different medications to treat each symptom…separately, or they’d merely say “that’s just your normal.”

One morning I woke up early with what I thought was a bad stomach flu.  My husband went to work, the kids all went to school and I stayed in bed.  I continued to get violently sick and seemed to be running to the bathroom at increasing intervals.   Only about an hour after my husband had left for work I noticed, in a daze, that the toilet was completely filled with blood.  Not anything like I had ever seen before.  I called him to come home and take me to the hospital.  By the time he made it home and I made it to the hospital I was so weak I couldn’t walk.  As they were checking me in I had to go to the bathroom again and this time I passed out.  I was extremely close to having a blood transfusion but luckily we had gotten to the hospital just in time.  Long story short, I ended up in ICU for almost a week, but they still didn’t know what was wrong with me.  

After a couple of months, many blood tests and worthless prescriptions, we finally got a hint into the problem.  One of my blood tests came back way out of the normal range.  There is a screening test they can do for Celiac Disease, but keep in mind it is only a screening and not how they diagnose Celiac.  The screening tests your TTG IgA.  Normal range for TTG IgA is below 20, mine was 145!  Once they received this outrageous number the GI doctor told me he didn’t even have to perform the endoscopy to know the outcome but he did anyway since this is the only way to officially diagnose Celiac.  Also, it is worth mention, that if you are not currently eating foods containing gluten all the tests will come back negative.