Louise Hindle

I was 22 when I was diagnosed and was not long into my teaching career and had been under a lot of stress! For years, I’d been suffering from pain in my stomach and diarrhoea, but has put that all down to being a nervous person or stress. Then I went on an amazing holiday to Vegas and ate my body’s worth of gluten and I came back from that holiday really sick and my stomach was worse than ever. Then I got to the point where I had that gut instinct (quite literally) and i thought, something is not right. I went to the doctors and was brushed off as always and it took 3 visits for me to meet a doctor that gave a crap. This doctor I will always remember. He said, your symptoms sound like something is going on, let’s do an MOT of your bloods. And that’s what he did. As always, when something is up, you get a call relatively quickly and 3 days later, he said you have lots of gluten present in your blood. I was shocked! Never heard of coeliacs disease.

Low and behold, 3 months later, an endoscopy revealed my villi were well and truly depressed and they said it’s definitely coeliacs. Despite crying after several shopping trips, I adjusted. I still feel like an inconvenience sometimes which is ridiculous but I can’t get over my friends always asking, where shall we go? Your the one with the problem? They mean well, but it still feels like you’re not normal. But to be honest I felt so much better in myself now. My skin use to be terrible with cystic acne mountains but after going gluten-free, they greatly improved. Crazy what our bodies can do!