Why continual headaches might reveal you have Coeliac Disease

The chances are that right up to the 2000’s you will not have heard of Coeliac Disease. While more and more people are now diagnosed with the condition its not a new illness, its always been here but relatively recent scientific revelations mean that a Coeliac diagnosis can mean the difference between life and death.

I grew up in a house that always had painkillers in at first I never really asked why, but there they were, always in the cupboard in vast quantities, by and large they came via my grandmother who sacrificed her leg pain for my mother’s headaches a condition I only became aware of as I hit my teens. My mother would often have these headaches, these would last for days or weeks, but back in the 1980’s doctors would more often than not blame it on stress, as a low paid divorcee that was a highly plausible solution to my mother’s condition. In the early 1990’s my mother died of ovarian cancer and the thoughts of her headaches disappeared with her passing.

About two years after she died, I began experiencing these same headaches. It started as a brain fog, then they grew in intensely over the years to the point that I could think of nothing other than the headache I was experiencing sometimes these headaches would last for days, sometimes only a few hours but in any event I would need copious amounts of painkillers to allow me time to sleep, pretty much the only thing that made headaches disapear. Fortunately, I became the new target for my grandmother’s painkiller supply. The doctors deciding my headaches were a result of… Yes you guessed it stress. The stress of my mothers passing weighing heavy on my mind, I knew different however, and my grandmother had her own assumptions that it was hereditary, she explained my grandfather who I hardly knew suffered horrendous headaches, she figured he had it, his daughter had it and now as a descendant I had it. One concerning aspect that played over and over in my mind for me was that both had died relatively early, my mother at 46 and my grandfather at 50.

Over the space of twenty years my condition worsened. Other aspects began including continual tiredness and the ability to just drift off to sleep anywhere, while at night having disturbed sleep patterns. The other slightly less pleasant aspect to discuss was the fact that I was using over the counter medications to hide my almost continuous diarrhoea. Despite feeling continually fobbed off by medical practitioners in 2014 I opted to give it one last chance to get a resolution. My doctor sent me for a brain scan ignoring my bowel condition, but the scan proved to show nothing. Still however I persisted with getting answers, now in my forties I considered myself well into the danger zone.

A surprising return visit to the doctor unlocked the point I had been getting at for many years. Initially I had reservations about returning to get help as my usual doctor was off sick and the option was that I would need to see a locum, this brash German lady sat me down and said “What’s your problem now?” I explained my issues. She asked me two questions; if I had joint pain and if I felt my sleeping patterns were not good. I expressed that this was the case and to my surprise she said in a matter-of-fact voice “I know what is wrong with you, but I need to send you for a blood test. I believe that you have a condition called coeliac disease” The following day I arrived at the local hospital to have six vials of blood taken.

It was less than a week before I got the diagnosis, that diagnosis was exactly what she assumed, I was indeed a coeliac. A coeliac is someone who has the inability to digest wheat and gluten, basically the matter sits in your bowl and rots until it dissolves away, however during the rotting process it can seriously affect the walls of your bowel, or more specifically the coral looking spongey fingers that sit there moving back and forth to dissolve food, this rotting process will affect your health creating extreme bowel issues and at all times headaches. The only resolution to this is to remove those products from your diet and providing you adhere to that diet your life can become much better.

Many scientists believe that gluten intolerance is a waiting game, a bomb waiting to go off for all of us, the more exposed to it we are, the quicker it hits us. A dietician at Basildon University Hospital in Essex, United Kingdom described our bodies as a kind of un-emptiable piggy bank. She explained that we start life with an allowance and once we have filled our “piggy bank” there is no turning back, you either ignore it and all that rotting food leads to varied forms of cancer, or you deal with it head on. Unfortunately, once you are diagnosed there is never any going back, this is it for life, once you irradicate the issue you can never go back to eating the gluten. Interestingly the same dietician also told me a headache is rarely caused by anything in your head, it is almost always another part of your body giving you a warning sign.

While irradicating gluten from your life is inconvenient its much easier to get around than you might think. If you do suffer from repeated or prolonged headaches, always consider medical help, it could be your body telling you its an intolerance waiting to be discovered, do not ignore it because allowing it to progress could rapidly reduce your life expectancy. The spongey fingers I mentioned earlier are in all of us, but as the condition progresses the fingers rather than standing upright begin to fall over, getting the condition while the fingers are upright is key to turning your life around and less likely to indicate far more serious conditions. Unfortunately because of the bowel related issues that develop over time, many are too embarrassed to seek out medical help.

Without leaving you on a bad note, discovery of an intolerance and sticking to a diet can massively increase your life expectancy and give you a renewed feeling of internal positivity, you’ll feel younger, healthier and happier. I felt like I was in my forties in my thirties and now I approach fifty, bodily I feel like forty is just around the corner. Taking wheat and gluten out of your life is inconvenient, but it also widens your palettes horizons, introducing you to new ways of cooking and transforming your relationship with it.