A Celiac Disease story

---

I was a very sickly, weak child. I was always regurgitating and then swallowing my vommit throughout the day. School friends would know what I had for breakfast by the smell. "He's got a weak stomach valve" was the doctor's diagnosis.

I was always hungry and was regarded as a greedy child. When I was very young, I am told that I stole food.

Early in the second term of grammar school, I was off school for a week. I don`t recall with what. But I lost the ability to control my vommit.

Two weeks later, I was off school again and unable to keep food down. I lost wieght. I could chuck my vommit across the room sometimes. After a while I had a Barium meal X ray to check for a stomoch ulcer.

In an effort to get me back to school, I went in for mornings only. That did not last long. My mother at one point talked to me about dying and I should "give up my pain to a good cause." Someone told me decades later that my mother did not know if I would survive through the nights.

Eventually my mother persueaded the doctor to send me to a hospital clinic where a young doctor said I should be admitted for tests.    

After 10 days, the only test done was another Barium meal X Ray. I was sent home on my 12th birthday. I weighed less than 4 stone. I crouched on the floor against the radiator in agony from gut ache that night. That pain was very real and not imagined. However, the general concensus was that I was making myself sick so as to avoid school. It was all in my mind! I was not really ill. 

A neighbour suggested trying a gluten free diet as her own son had been on one. Out of desperation, my mother tried this. I improved, could keep food down and diarea turned to constipation. 

I returned to school for the summer term but was regarded as the boy who made himself ill so as to avoid school. We could not take our own sandwiches or food to school and all the school kithen could provide was a salad dinner every day. I was called The Living Skeleton, Biafran or Belson Boy by class mates. 

A couple of years later, I confided to my sister that I did not feel well and it was if I was eating normal food again. A week later my mother asked me how I felt. I said I did not feel well and had gut ache and diarea. She said she had made my last batch of bread and biscuits with normal flour.   

With this as ammunition, she was able to persude the doctor to send me to a specialist at last. A biopsy revealed an intestine with no villi at all. I could now get gluten free food on prescription. On subsequent visits I was referred to as the boy with the strange biopsy result. But there was never any information or feedback from blood tests given. I did not learn anything about ceoliac disease and never met any other sufferer.

40 years later, I developed bloating, flatulance, weight gain, psoriasis, numbness in one leg, tingling in the feet, intense itching in the legs with occasional red blothcing, painfull knees, extreme fatigue. I thought it was old age. I went to the doctor with the skin condition who said it looked like psoriasis, had anone else in the family had it? As no one had, I searched on line to see where it could have come from. I found the link to Coeliac disease along with the all the other issues I had.

And I had always beeen told Coeliac disease was just an allergy to gluten and confined to the gut.