Thursday, December 10, 2009

A new community, plus the scary side of Silly Yaks.

This afternoon I just joined a wonderful ceoliac society online called CeoliacFaces, already I've had two lovely people welcome me! It came while I was trying to find a correlation between ceoliacs who have siblings with CD too. I was wondering just how many of my children will end up having it.
Then I came across the new community and started checking out the blogs, and I found this image:

It made me quite upset. These are not malnurished children from a third world country, these are undiagnoses ceoliac children from London! OK it was taken in 1923, you can find all the details from Sonia's Gluten Free blog here. It is so frustrating to get a real diagnosis, the below images are of my son, Raven. He's four, and he can wear his little 2 yo sister's clothes! This is taken while he was bloating - at this stage he was still on gluten. In this condition the hospital pedatricians told my husband and I that they couldn't do anything for him. Yes he'd tested positive to an anti-immune disease but he didn't seem bad enough to pursue it. Judge for yourselves:

Currently he's doing OK, he still bloats a little but not like this! He's gluten free! He has a little dairy now. He doesn't have accidents at least once a day, he isn't in pain every day. We took him to a new doctor who agrees that I'm as diagnosed as much as I need to be (it's up to me if I want to go on a gluten challenge and have the biopsy - I just can't imagine going through the agony I was going through a year ago...). But why should a little boy have to go through this daily because the doctors say he's not bad enough to warrent further investigations? So this new doctor got us a DNA test - Raven's got both markers to say he has the potential for CD. They are letting him back to the hospital but no way was I waiting to put him on a gluten free diet. This cycle of trying to get a diagnosis for Raven has been a year and a half so far. I remember (and not knowing at the time why) Raven would scream if I tried putting his knees up to his tummy as a baby to change a nappy, so to be kind I would change him on his side. I feel so guilty now and I get upset that they still have not given us any real diagnosis at the hospital.

We are now pursuing Monika's issues. That's the two year old. Before eating food she was way above average height and weight, now she's below. She doesn't seem to bloat like Raven but she's developed severe diahrea in the last month. The doctor was so close to saying GF diet, but she now after discovering she has lost nearly 2 kilos in a month that to be on the safe side she'd better give her antibiotics just in case it was missed in her stool sample (that was negative for giardia). We can put her off gluten in two weeks. I think I just want her off it altogether! We have now got access to a pharmacy test @ $30 which is a blood prick test which shows gluten intolerance, we are going to get that for each of our children! Thanks, Q.