One of his specialities is "referral service" so I was hoping he'd be willing to work with me on this. It's not like I was asking him to wave a magic wand and fix me automagically, or engaging in "drug seeking behavior" here. But he clearly a) knew what celiac is and entails and b) was familiar enough with its presentation to know a bunch of the other comorbid issues it would be helpful to test for if it turns out I am celiac.
It's not All in Your Head. Whether or not it's Celiac, you have real symptoms. My stomach ache that started when I lived in SJ, and I went to doctor after doctor and nobody could tell me anything other than "maybe it's stress", was finally diagnosed as Eosinophilic Esophagitis 8 years later. And the symptoms I hadn't known were connected went back to my teens. Even if the test for celiac comes back negative, don't give up. It's nice to have a diagnosis, but if you can manage the symptoms, you'll be okay. (I still can't believe no one suggested to me that I might have a wheat/gluten intolerance when I said that the only time the stomach ache had gone away was when I tried doing a low carbohydrate diet.)
Absolutely! I'm slowly getting it through my thick skull that, like the Unfuck Your Habitat manifesto that nobody deserves to live in a filthy stinking pit, nobody deserves to be miserable from poor health symptoms all the time. I am allowed to keep trying doctors until I find one who can help. Having a "cheat sheet" of symptoms to look at helped me look at my health a lot more objectively, but it didn't change what I feel or what I've been experiencing. It just helped me put it into words doctors understand
( ... )
And it's easier to rule celiac in or out now, when I'm eating gluten and the blood test is fairly reliable than it would be if I'd been off gluten for a while. So, just in terms of logical order of operations, it makes sense to do this.
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My stomach ache that started when I lived in SJ, and I went to doctor after doctor and nobody could tell me anything other than "maybe it's stress", was finally diagnosed as Eosinophilic Esophagitis 8 years later. And the symptoms I hadn't known were connected went back to my teens.
Even if the test for celiac comes back negative, don't give up. It's nice to have a diagnosis, but if you can manage the symptoms, you'll be okay. (I still can't believe no one suggested to me that I might have a wheat/gluten intolerance when I said that the only time the stomach ache had gone away was when I tried doing a low carbohydrate diet.)
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