About 9 and a half years ago my fiancé died due to a massive heart attack. I was in complete and utter shock. I mean how does a 30 year old die from a heart attack. I went into understandable depression. It was during this period that my body totally went crazy. I stop processing all food. I spent most days (18ish hours a day) asleep. I lost 90 lbs in 6 months. I was scared. I had the fear that something random would kill me. I mean my mental state was already stretched at this time and my paranoia was ridiculous. I kept going to drs because I knew something was wrong. But everyone just told me it was grieve. It manifests in different ways for different people. I just needed to deal with my grieve and I’d start processing food again. And I tried. I went to therapists. I prayed. I went through all the tools that are suggested for grieving. But I kept getting sicker.
In October, I went to school like I was supposed to. I was teaching 6th grade at the time. And honestly , it was getting me through the grief. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I remember being weak but didn’t think anything of it. I would just muscle through it and rest after work. Walking down the halls I remember stopping when one of my students grabbed my arm. My students didn’t so that. I wasn’t (and still not) a super touchy feely person. I needed personal space. When I looked at him he said “you were falling”. Again, I tried to muscle through it because I was “just grieving”. The next morning I got up when my alarm went off, started walking to the bathroom, and passed out. I was done. My family was done. I went to another dr except this time I didn’t even have the energy to stay awake in the office and I was so dehydrated they couldn’t draw blood. That day I was admitted to the hospital for malnutrition and dehydration. A few days later I was released from the hospital but nothing was fixed. I still wasn’t processing food.
Christmas Eve, I still wasn’t any better. I was still struggling to do the most basic things. I hadn’t been able to work since October and was actually getting worse. However my aunt asked me to run downtown to pick up a gift at my favorite store. Looking back, I’m pretty sure she was trying to get me out of the house. We didn’t buy anything that night. We did however luck out. My aunt ran into someone that she was friends with that managed a gastroenterologist’s office. She just gave a quick run down of the things that I had gone through. She told my aunt to call her the day they opened up after Christmas and she would make sure I was seen. WooHoo! I finally had someone that was going to search for answers. So on Jan 2 we went in for an endoscopy trying to figure out what was going on. The dr gave me the run down of what it could be including but not limited to grief (UGH!). Then he added almost like he forgot “And we are going to check for something called Celiac Disease. I really don’t think you have that but then we can rule that out.’ Then he sent me home with specific instructions not to research anything. And I didn’t, especially not celiac disease. I mean he said I didn’t have it. A few days later I get a call at 8ish at night from the dr, which by the way is NEVER a good thing. He said “I need you to research Celiac disease. You have it. In fact on a scale of 1-10 you are a 27.” What!! You said I didn’t have it! Now I research it and it seems like a death sentence. I called my mom. She immediately came home and helped me research. Our whole lives just got flipped.