I guess they really have no way of knowing when my body started attacking itself whenever I ingested that nasty little protein gluten. When I think back over my lifetime so far, I remember having "stomach problems" as far back as my early teenage years. Me and my friend, who also had stomach problems, always had a bottle of Pepto Bismal on hand. That would put almost 34 years between the "problem" and the diagnosis. But maybe those early years of the nausea, stomach aches, pain and other symptoms were attributable to something else and the Celiac Disease was triggered much later in my life. Who knows?

I guess it doesn't really matter - the WHEN is far less important than the WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE that the Celiac diagnosis has brought to the forefront of my life. After two months of severe symptoms that had me spending at least 2 days a week in bed just to replenish the energy it took to get through the other 5 days, I finally got to a place where someone FINALLY could tell me the answer to a lot of the WHY's of the past few years of my life.

The good news is that Celiac Disease is manageable with nothing more than strict adherance to a gluten-free lifestyle. The bad news is that a strict adherance to anything has always been, well, something of a challenge to me. I've been compared to a cat at times - I'm all for doing something as long as it's my idea. This is something that I have to figure out to use to my advantage in living this new lifestyle.

I plan to write more about the past few weeks since my "official" diagnosis following a small bowel biopsy, April 7, 2009. Not even a month has passed and already I have been through a myriad of physical and emotional changes. I had a wonderful week of feeling at the top of the world and then things sort of leveled off. And recently the leveling has begun to take a downward slide. Mostly emotionally, but there have been some old familiar pains which has put me on a backwards quest to identify the gluten that I somehow accidently ingested.

My hope is that I will use this blog to dump all of the stuff in my head so I don't become someone my friends and family avoid. I'm pretty sure the topic of gluten will become something everyone will run from after hearing about it a few hundred times.

And I hope to be able to list some good links I've found from other reliable sites and blogs of others who have walked this path a whole lot longer than I have.

I don't dream of sugarplums anymore...I am too busy dreaming of the ingredients of what seems like the thousands of labels I spend my days reading. They say it will get easier and I that gives me something to hold on to.