ibrown
i think my first real symptoms was lethargy, fatigue, sore joints, adrenal cortisol issues, eye issues, small amount of D
I had suffered from IBS symptoms for 15 years or more before this and had been avoiding gluten, yeast and lactose for about 8 years, which i figure when the symptoms listed above started, maybe due to my diet meant the D wasnt the main symptom
2.5 years after those symptoms, i started to have chronic D attacks which i think some major stresses in life bought on.
What were everyones very first symptoms?
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belgiangirl
- Little Blue Penguin
- Posts: 26
- Joined: Thu Jun 03, 2010 3:53 pm
Hello and welcome,
I have been having D on and off for the past 25 years after having caught a bacteria called Campylobacter Jejuni in Tunisia. Over those years I had my stools tested, my blood but noone could ever find out what was really wrong with me. A year ago my husband died at the age of 51 and I am convinced it is the stress of his death that caused the onset of MC with me. I am very happy to have found this site and to be not alone with this disease.
take care,
Annie
I have been having D on and off for the past 25 years after having caught a bacteria called Campylobacter Jejuni in Tunisia. Over those years I had my stools tested, my blood but noone could ever find out what was really wrong with me. A year ago my husband died at the age of 51 and I am convinced it is the stress of his death that caused the onset of MC with me. I am very happy to have found this site and to be not alone with this disease.
take care,
Annie
Hi there,
Old member here, just finally paying a visit. Sure do miss this board, by the way!
I would've probably said 5 to 10 yrs of GI symptoms prior to my first colonoscopy which produced the MC diagnosis, but in about three days after I started the GF diet, many other non-GI symptoms seemed to vanish unexpectedly.
Most notably, I had been diagnosed with arthritis in my feet, quite coincidentally, when I had JUST started on that part of my diet.
I had thought perhaps the foot symptoms would reappear, and that it might've been a coincidence that it had gone away that soon after I'd started the diet, even though the foot pain upon first walking in the morning and tremendous swelling had been constant for the year prior to that.
Doc who had made the arthritis diagnosis had given me Celebrex, and it stayed in the drawer from then til it ran out of date because those foot symptoms NEVER returned.
Basically, pretty much everything had hurt...tendons were tight, bones hurt (osteoporosis), muscles hurt -- couldn't tell where pain in one tissue started and where the next began. That had gone on to a degree for over a decade. I was VERY stiff allll the time, and my hands were pretty much useless and painful as well.
Had the neuro symptoms, so would imagine big gluten loads had clouded my thinking at times growing up. Big one to note was the idiopathic peripheral neuropathy...supposedly the most common symptom of celiac disease, as I later learned.
Incidentally, the neuropathy in the feet went away in all three of our family members who had gluten sensitivity, and right away.
One of the worst symptoms I'd had for decades (since my twenties, at least that's when I realized they weren't food poisoning! Ha!) were migraines.
These had the usual "triggers" like changing sleep habits, hormonal changes, etc.
As my GI symptoms worsened, I had noticed these changing in that the migraines seemed almost constant, so once on the diet, it was pretty easy to tell it was relieving that as well. I will be triggered with a severe one, say if I eat something with nitrites in it as a preservative in any quantity, such as a Thanksgiving ham a friend sent me one year-- it had NONE of my allergens in it. This is because our blood brain barriers(like those of classically diagnosed celiacs) are more porous for easier passage of these excitotoxins into our brain tissues, and excitotoxins cause problems like migraines.
Used to have a very long chronology of all the things problems that I had, but now, it would take me a month to think of all those things. I'd had surgeries to rid myself of some of them -- Thyroid was the one that was removed within months of the biopsy of the colon and the diagnosis of M.C.
Before the diet, a very simple stressor would act as a trigger for the diarrhea, but now, the house can fall down, and I can be very upset, but still no diarrhea. HAS to be the diet! I've been basically symptom free since I started removing foods I found to cause diarrhea, the huge portion of that being reduced by the gluten removal -- mother of all allergens, I'd say. My other allergens, as they were one by one eliminated, resulted in increasingly normal stools, and they continue to be normal since they got that way by sometime in the spring of 2004. Fatigue took me about 6 months to really notice a difference. You're likely to one day just wake up and think, hey, where did all that fatigue go?!!
I've never felt better...not in decades! Now, I'm just old! Ha!
Best wishes to you, and all the newbies!
Luce
Old member here, just finally paying a visit. Sure do miss this board, by the way!
I would've probably said 5 to 10 yrs of GI symptoms prior to my first colonoscopy which produced the MC diagnosis, but in about three days after I started the GF diet, many other non-GI symptoms seemed to vanish unexpectedly.
Most notably, I had been diagnosed with arthritis in my feet, quite coincidentally, when I had JUST started on that part of my diet.
I had thought perhaps the foot symptoms would reappear, and that it might've been a coincidence that it had gone away that soon after I'd started the diet, even though the foot pain upon first walking in the morning and tremendous swelling had been constant for the year prior to that.
Doc who had made the arthritis diagnosis had given me Celebrex, and it stayed in the drawer from then til it ran out of date because those foot symptoms NEVER returned.
Basically, pretty much everything had hurt...tendons were tight, bones hurt (osteoporosis), muscles hurt -- couldn't tell where pain in one tissue started and where the next began. That had gone on to a degree for over a decade. I was VERY stiff allll the time, and my hands were pretty much useless and painful as well.
Had the neuro symptoms, so would imagine big gluten loads had clouded my thinking at times growing up. Big one to note was the idiopathic peripheral neuropathy...supposedly the most common symptom of celiac disease, as I later learned.
Incidentally, the neuropathy in the feet went away in all three of our family members who had gluten sensitivity, and right away.
One of the worst symptoms I'd had for decades (since my twenties, at least that's when I realized they weren't food poisoning! Ha!) were migraines.
These had the usual "triggers" like changing sleep habits, hormonal changes, etc.
As my GI symptoms worsened, I had noticed these changing in that the migraines seemed almost constant, so once on the diet, it was pretty easy to tell it was relieving that as well. I will be triggered with a severe one, say if I eat something with nitrites in it as a preservative in any quantity, such as a Thanksgiving ham a friend sent me one year-- it had NONE of my allergens in it. This is because our blood brain barriers(like those of classically diagnosed celiacs) are more porous for easier passage of these excitotoxins into our brain tissues, and excitotoxins cause problems like migraines.
Used to have a very long chronology of all the things problems that I had, but now, it would take me a month to think of all those things. I'd had surgeries to rid myself of some of them -- Thyroid was the one that was removed within months of the biopsy of the colon and the diagnosis of M.C.
Before the diet, a very simple stressor would act as a trigger for the diarrhea, but now, the house can fall down, and I can be very upset, but still no diarrhea. HAS to be the diet! I've been basically symptom free since I started removing foods I found to cause diarrhea, the huge portion of that being reduced by the gluten removal -- mother of all allergens, I'd say. My other allergens, as they were one by one eliminated, resulted in increasingly normal stools, and they continue to be normal since they got that way by sometime in the spring of 2004. Fatigue took me about 6 months to really notice a difference. You're likely to one day just wake up and think, hey, where did all that fatigue go?!!
I've never felt better...not in decades! Now, I'm just old! Ha!
Best wishes to you, and all the newbies!
Luce