Not Celiac after all, possibly IBS

I still had occasional gut episodes after eliminating gluten from my diet; I studied hidden gluten from many informative websites and read labels closely to make sure I didn’t eat hidden gluten by mistake. Since I had already ruled out the biggest diseases: colon cancer (colonoscopy), ovarian and uterine cancer (pelvic ultrasound), diverticulitis (CT scan), cervical cancer (pap smear), Celiac (bloodwork), and bladder infection (urinalysis w/ culture). I never saw signs of bleeding (fresh blood, tarry stools, or coffee-ground stools), so it probably isn’t ulcerative colitis. I decided it was time to do more research.

 

No power for 5 hours

It stormed a little bit two days ago, but it wasn’t too awful where I live, but I heard other parts of town lost power. But I was very grateful for the rain, plus it really cooled things down, which was great. Yesterday it got up to 94F before more storms came through, but this time they hit me harder — no flooding thank goodness, but we lost power with a big lightning blast.

I kept waiting for the power to come back on like it usually does, but after the storm passed, we figured it wouldn’t come back until the Centerpoint guys fixed it. I was hungry and didn’t want to cook in the dark since I guessed the outtage probably wouldn’t be long term, so I went to buy dinner for the first time in months.

 

Feeling better, and still have ’some’ garden

No official diagnosis yet, but feeling almost better. The steroid pills made me feel tense and anxious for about two hours after taking them, so I didn’t get any sleep until last night finally. But with the sleep, steroids, and antibiotics, I feel almost chipper today! Enough to actually go into my teensy garden that I had such big plans for 8^(

 

Gut episodes update

Update on the gut episodes:

After approximately six weeks of no episodes, and eating gluten-free, I had an episode (left lower quadrant) bad enough to send me to the ER of a major hospital system in Houston because I feared intestinal blockage once I started sounding like a beer-swilling sailor. Long story short: Abdominal CT – negative.

 

GF: Back to back gut episodes

I’ve been extremely bloated for over a week; my gut episodes last between 24-36 hours, then start up again. My husband, who won’t do an elimination diet and loves packaged and junk food, has also had a few episodes this week.

The only new processed food we’ve recently added was Quaker Rice Cakes. I ate some as recently as this morning, but now I’m going to skip them a few days to see if that helps. I found a thread about Quaker Rice Cakes at Gluten Free Forum, and it seems many people there can’t tolerate Quaker Rice Cakes either.

 

Update on losing too much weight (duh)

I brought the scale in here so I could look it up online, but Health o meter no longer has our model on their site. I weighed myself a few more times in here, on hardwood floors, and got the same weight each time. Umm, we got all the weird readings when it was on the bathroom floor, with tiles, oops.

Now that it’s in here on the hardwood floor, it’s given the same reading many times in a row, about where I should be. But I did lose another pound, yay! And more yay that I’m not losing it too quickly like I thought.

 

Google calculator + recipes = long food

I was using Google to combine the dry ingredients in a recipe so I could divide it in half, to save some for later. I got the total amount in milliliters, but when I tried dividing that in half, I somehow ended up with millimeters and centimeters.

I should be able to fit the saved batch fit into the freezer, since it’s a bit under 6 inches.

 

Weight loss?

Since cutting back on sugar and high-glycemic foods (mostly), then wheat, I felt like I was losing weight. I asked my husband to buy a scale since we haven’t had one since the flood in 2001. He brought home a digital scale that required reading a book to figure out how to work it. At that time, I had lost six pounds, which was acceptable because it was still winter so I didn’t do my outside activities.

 

Another gut episode, and sick afterwards

Since I self-diagnosed myself as having a problem with gluten after doing an elimination diet, I’ve had only a few gut episodes. Most were from my thinking I could eat just a little wheat, until I read that once a gluten-sensitive person stopped wheat they most likely would suffer from hyper-sensitivity if they ate it again. Once I figured that out, I bought non-gluten flour, baking mix, and pasta from the health food store, and the episodes dropped almost completely.

 

Gluten free store south of Houston

I did an elimination diet after suffering from severe gut pain, and the OB and GI doctors ruled out many things after doing bloodwork, ultrasound, and a CT. I found out that eating wheat products is what’s triggering the gut pain, so it seems I probably have Celiac disease. The CT was done after I went to the ER because I thought I might have had blocked intestines (I’ve had a few patients with that in the past, and it seemed I had all the symptoms except for stuff coming up green, but the massive amounts of disgusting belches had me thinking it might happen soon).

Once I realized that wheat equals pain, it was easy to avoid wheat products the first few weeks. But after a while, I started craving baked foods like bread and muffins, and also pasta. So I had to find a store that sold gluten-free food.