| Amanda Brown, of Plainview, works as a student teacher at an elementary school during the week. She also teaches Zumba, a fitness class that combines exercise with Latin music and dance. Two years ago she was a student at SUNY Oneonta, finishing up her sophomore year. Two years ago, she was told she had stomach cancer.
When she first went away to college, Brown was diagnosed with mono. Months later, still sick, she went to the hospital. Doctors found a cyst on the outside of her ovary.
“I just never got better,” she says. A year later, she went back to the hospital with horrible stomach pain, and was given a new diagnosis: an interception of the bowel. She was kept overnight, given a CAT scan and sent on her way.
A week later she was back in the hospital, again with severe stomach pain. Diagnosis No. 5: There was nothing wrong.
“It was almost like saying to me, ‘You’re making it up, it’s in your head,’ without verbalizing it,” she says.
Her gastroenterologist back at home found a surgeon she could visit in Cooperstown, N.Y., while she finished her semester upstate. It was finals week, so Brown made an appointment and took the 40-minute trip before her exams, looking for an answer.
“He felt my stomach and told me I had cancer,” she says.
Scared and upset, Brown finished up her semester and went home. Her doctor took a blood test, had her swallow a camera pill that would take pictures of her intestines, and took a biopsy on her small intestine.
She didn’t have cancer.
She had celiac disease, a potentially fatal, but treatable, disease that is almost never diagnosed properly, if at all. Even when it is, parents and children struggle to get others—including doctors and school administrators—to take them seriously.
it's kind of long, full version is here: http://www.longislandpress.com/2010/04/15/gluten-free-millions-suffer-from-celiac-few-diagnosed/?utm_source=forum&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=JPG |
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