Hello and welcome to my new blog🤗 I have decided to start this to help others through their celiac disease diagnosis journey. So let's start with how I was diagnosed. It is a very long story but this will be the short version. Over the summer before my sophomore year of college I was experiencing migraines almost daily and was always very tired. Towards the end of summer I was working a volleyball camp when my vision went blurry and my entire left side of my body went numb. Right down the middle, even the left side of my tongue. I thought I was having a stroke or something and had to have an ambulance take me to the ER. The doctors wrote it off as a migraine aura.
The athletic doctor at WVU then decided a emergency migraine medicine would be good to try incase I had a migraine on a game day. They instructed me to take the pill that night so I would know what it would feel like if I had to take it before a game. I only took half of the pill and ended up in the ER because it made me so sick. For the next couple of days my stomach was in shambles and I thought it would eventually go away because the medicine just did not agree with me. Wrong. Weeks turned into a month, all while we started preseason (8 hours of volleyball a day). I had no idea what was wrong with me and neither did the doctors. They said it was just a stomach virus and I continued to push through practices when I could not even stand up in the shower because I felt so ill. The nausea was the worst thing I have ever been through. Fast forward a month and my trainer finally let me go see a real GI doctor. She did not think I would have celiac but I asked her to test me for it because I, of course, diagnosed myself on google. Turned out my celiac numbers were through the roof and once I had my endoscopy done I literally had no villi legs left in my small intenstine:) Great for a D1 college athlete. The story goes on after diagnosis because I had to learn how to fuel my body in a new way, I had lost so much weight from not being able to absorb nutrients with my villi, and the mental aspects were just as hard as the physical aspects. I am not sure what was the set off point for my celiac disease to come out but after going gluten-free I don't have migraines as much anymore. More details to come and how I overcame everything while continuing to play volleyball:)
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