In the beginning

Today I woke up to the sound of birds chirping, the sun rising and warming the earth, and a feeling of peace and happiness inside me. Four years ago, my mornings were quite different. I usually awoke many times during the night. Not from restless sleep or a dream I was having or because my son needed me. I woke up because I was having severe abdominal pain. It felt like my insides were tying themselves into the tightest knots they could. I knew that I was going to be in for a day of unpleasantness. My mind would start running through the previous day wondering what I had eaten. Why was I in so much pain? Why was I getting sick. I'm not talking about a few extra visits to the bathroom. I'm talking about 24 or more hours of constant pain and running. I would get so dehydrated because I could not keep anything in. I was scared and tired. I started with my primary care physician, as most of us would. He thought it was either my gallbladder or gluten intolerance. So here started my journey of doctor visits and tests.

The tests started with checking out my gallbladder - normal. Checking my labs - normal. Then checking my colon from top to bottom - normal. No celiac or anything abnormal. Great! Right? Not so much. After taking gluten out of my diet, I felt better, but not great. I was still spending way more time in the bathroom and curled up in pain than I wanted to. On top of all of this, my weight was dropping. Every "sick" episode decreased my weight by 5 - 10 pounds. As I would start to gain it back, the next episode would hit. My lowest weight was 40 pounds less than where I started. I am 5' 5" and weighed 97 pounds. That was in January of this year. Here I was in my early 30's with a beautiful family. My son is amazing and growing up. My husband is so supportive and loving. We love to be outside and explore the world together. Unfortunately, I was missing out on life.

The next step is what has caused the most issues in my life to this day. Because the tests were all normal, my doctor suggested that I see an allergist because he thought I might have food allergies. I went in for skin testing and guess what..... I was allergic to a ton of foods! The test said I was allergic to soy, wheat, barley, buckwheat, peanuts, tomato, peas, carrots, celery, and more. My head started spinning and the tears welled up in my eyes. I looked at the allergist and asked, "What am I suppose to eat?" His response was, "None of those foods unless you want to get sick. You'll have to trial them and see which ones make you the sickest." Well, if he had been in my shoes the year prior and had spent more time in the bathroom than enjoying life, I wonder if he would have been more compassionate. After that appointment, my mental state went from somewhat healthy to extremely unhealthy. I was so scared of getting sick again that my mind went off the deep end. I became extremely scared of germs and food. Scared of germs? Ok, maybe that could be a little normal, but scared of food? My diet became rice, corn, a few meats, broccoli, and tapioca based items. Guess what happened? My pain started to go away. This made my brain think that I was on the right track, but is this the way to health? Not eating a variety of foods? And I was still not feeling well all the time and suffering from abdominal pain. In fact, 2 years into this saga, I was so sick that I ended up passing out and getting an ambulance ride to the hospital. This only made my fear worse. So what was next?