My Story
Hi! My name is Kathryn and I’m a 30 something that has been on my healing journey for over 15 years. I was diagnosed with Celiac and then Lyme disease but let me start at the beginning…
I have never been extremely healthy, even as a kid. I was the kid who got every bug going around school, always got sick with the changing of the seasons and missed lots of school. My kidney stopped working when I was 11 from built up scar tissue from kidney infections. Had my first stomach ulcer when I was 15 and spent the first 3 months of high school eating baby food less than step three.
After my freshman year of college, I decided I wanted to study abroad and applied to a business school in Barcelona. It was an amazing 6 months of learning the language, the people and exploring Europe. As soon as I got back from Spain I started having a lot of stomach problems reintegrating American food as I had eaten mainly fish, eggs and vegetables in Barcelona. I went to see a few doctors about my stomach problems and one suggested a possible gluten intolerance, just 5 months before I was leaving to study in Italy so there wasn’t enough time to perform the tests so we pressed pause until after my study abroad but he suggested I have a low gluten diet while abroad.
Being young, I said no way I am going gluten free right before I move to Italy, I can make this change when I get home but my body had other plans and I lasted only 3 weeks in Italy before my body even refused liquids. I realized the doctor wasn’t joking about the severity of my Celiac. When I returned to the states, I was diagnosed with assumed Celiac disease as I had the genetics for it but since I had been gluten free for over 6 months could not do the intestinal testing. It explained most of the issues I had – but not all. I started on a strict gluten free diet have been since.
Once I graduated college in Portland, Maine, I decided to move to Austin, TX and leave winter for good. A year into living in Austin, I got so ill I was out of work for 6 weeks, could barely get out of bed and could not figure out what had happened. It started as a kidney infection, turned into an allergic reaction to everything and had no idea what went wrong. The only thought I had was the apartment was making me sick–there were no other answers. I moved and I slowly got better, so I thought I had found the cause.
Two years go by and I was in the best health of my life until I had the largest gluten contamination incidence of my life. My gluten incidences range from pretty painful to hospitalization. This gluten incidence required high dose steroids for over a month. Months went by after this incidence, and I never got better, I actually got worse. Just a couple months later, couldn’t walk upstairs or cook a meal or work out. I was such an active person just a couple months before (bikram yoga every day, fresh cooked meals more than not, random activities all week). I started to going to every doctor around trying to figure out why I wasn’t getting better and why the symptoms were so different than they had been before.
Over a year and fifteen doctors later, I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. In combination it explains all of the symptoms Celiac didn’t and they actually have a LOT of overlapping symptoms that I had always just attributed to Celiac. When I was 15 was the last tick bite, without a bullseye, and took decades to figure out.
This website is my journey from diagnosis on so that people can learn from my journey, never feel alone on the healing path and be a part of story.
My Story
Hi! My name is Kathryn and I’m a 30 something that has been on my healing journey for over 15 years. I was diagnosed with Celiac and then Lyme disease but let me start at the beginning…
I have never been extremely healthy, even as a kid. I was the kid who got every bug going around school, always got sick with the changing of the seasons and missed lots of school. My kidney stopped working when I was 11 from built up scar tissue from kidney infections. Had my first stomach ulcer when I was 15 and spent the first 3 months of high school eating baby food less than step three.
After my freshman year of college, I decided I wanted to study abroad and applied to a business school in Barcelona. It was an amazing 6 months of learning the language, the people and exploring Europe. As soon as I got back from Spain I started having a lot of stomach problems reintegrating American food as I had eaten mainly fish, eggs and vegetables in Barcelona. I went to see a few doctors about my stomach problems and one suggested a possible gluten intolerance, just 5 months before I was leaving to study in Italy so there wasn’t enough time to perform the tests so we pressed pause until after my study abroad but he suggested I have a low gluten diet while abroad.
Being young, I said no way I am going gluten free right before I move to Italy, I can make this change when I get home but my body had other plans and I lasted only 3 weeks in Italy before my body even refused liquids. I realized the doctor wasn’t joking about the severity of my Celiac. When I returned to the states, I was diagnosed with assumed Celiac disease as I had the genetics for it but since I had been gluten free for over 6 months could not do the intestinal testing. It explained most of the issues I had – but not all. I started on a strict gluten free diet have been since.
Once I graduated college in Portland, Maine, I decided to move to Austin, TX and leave winter for good. A year into living in Austin, I got so ill I was out of work for 6 weeks, could barely get out of bed and could not figure out what had happened. It started as a kidney infection, turned into an allergic reaction to everything and had no idea what went wrong. The only thought I had was the apartment was making me sick–there were no other answers. I moved and I slowly got better, so I thought I had found the cause.
Two years go by and I was in the best health of my life until I had the largest gluten contamination incidence of my life. My gluten incidences range from pretty painful to hospitalization. This gluten incidence required high dose steroids for over a month. Months went by after this incidence, and I never got better, I actually got worse. Just a couple months later, couldn’t walk upstairs or cook a meal or work out. I was such an active person just a couple months before (bikram yoga every day, fresh cooked meals more than not, random activities all week). I started to going to every doctor around trying to figure out why I wasn’t getting better and why the symptoms were so different than they had been before.
Over a year and fifteen doctors later, I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. In combination it explains all of the symptoms Celiac didn’t and they actually have a LOT of overlapping symptoms that I had always just attributed to Celiac. When I was 15 was the last tick bite, without a bullseye, and took decades to figure out.
This website is my journey from diagnosis on so that people can learn from my journey, never feel alone on the healing path and be a part of story.