Celiac Testing: the results are in

Yesterday I got the results back from my biopsies and blood tests that were done at the beginning of February.  All of them are negative for Celiac Disease. And I am not sure how I feel about this.

It is good if I don't have celiac disease. It means that my accidental ingestion of gluten may have less severe long-term impacts for my body. It means that if I slip up now and then, it's not necessarily a big deal. It also means that others in my family are less likely to have it, and my future children as well. All this is good. But I am confused.



Confused because my primary symptoms are associated with more with Celiac than with "just" Gluten Sensitivity. I don't just get tummy cramps and discomfort and diarrhea; I get fatigued, irritable, foggy-brained, miserably achy, tons of headaches, and basically just feel like I got run over by a truck all the time. At least, that's for the first few weeks. As time goes on I add to that with tummy problems, diarrhea, weight loss, etc. But my first symptoms are ones that come from a leaky gut that would be caused by an autoimmune reaction to gluten, not just from some gassy reaction to a food I have trouble digesting.

I'm also wondering which blood tests they did, because there are several different ones. IgG is different than IgA for example. Maybe they did every one that they possibly could have done, I don't know.

Since I'd been gluten free for 1.5 years, is it possible that 6 weeks of gluten challenge wasn't enough to get my body back to a state where the doctors could find celiac? I know it's hard to diagnose, and a negative test result doesn't guarantee you don't have it.

All of this makes me wonder, as I've wondered before, if there are many out there who actually have celiac disease but think they are only plagued by a simpler gluten sensitivity.

On the other hand, is it possible that Gluten Intolerance is a more robust problem than the traditional medical field wants to acknowledge at this point. For the most part, only CD is recognized as a legitimate illness, but I know that even though my tests all came back negative for CD, I am a different, sick and miserable person when I eat gluten.

And I want to know why. What is happening in my body when I eat gluten, and then what is healing when I take it away? Maybe someday there will be answers. But for now, I'm just sticking to the gluten free diet.