Light Headed

[Gregory]

Ok, my symptoms became very bad my junior year of college. However, I believe I have always had symptoms. My junior and senior year of high school, I worked at McDonalds (and ate their food...hmmm....my mouth still waters for a triple quarter pounder). Towards the end, I became so tense and depressed that I constantly was trying to go home early, and eventually quit that job. Of no surprise, I start to feel better (I thought at the time it was because I left the work condition. To add to that story, while working there my parents decided to upgrade my lunches to subway sandwiches (with cookies) instead of my standard ham and cheese sandwiches. This tripled the amount of bread that I was eating at the time.

Except for when I was a baby, I have always been a very lean kid. When I was 10, I started Taekwondo and did that until I started college. The reason I quit was that I was burning everything I had that I got to the point of almost passing out after a 30 minute workout (this was also during my time working at McDonalds). Also during this time I also started to write depressing poems, and had some big fights with my parents, which was attributed to being a late teen.

Now back to the main reason I am writing this. My junior year of college I got into the habit of keeping very irregular sleep hours (due to mass online games). During this time, I had extreme loss of appetite, weight loss, etc. The odd thing was that during classes, my stomach would start to burn very badly. After a few weeks of this, the burning started to be followed by light headiness (experienced by the end of my Taekwondo career). The light headiness then led to a point where my eyes would start to cross (creating double vision), my eyelids would become incredibly heavy, and my head would start to bob as I became on the point of passing out. This has been the situation for 4 years now. I have gone off gluten, then back on it many times. I have found that I have a huge improvement in my mood after being gluten free for a week. The reason I have gone onto gluten is because no doctor has been able to confirm that I am celiac sprue. I had a colonoscopy/blood test 4 years ago, a blood test 2 years ago, and they came back negative. Now, I am almost positive that I have it, but being a grad student now, it is soooo expensive to eat the specialty foods that are gluten free.

The following is a bit graphic, so you are warned.

Some of my other symptoms involve my feces. 5 years ago I had very bad constipation to the point of that my feces were very tiny hard pebbles (similar to the Oprah episode on colon cancer where the audience woman described her feces as being tiny pebbles). 2 years ago (can't remember if I was gluten free or just went back onto gluten) my feces turned green (not dark green, not bloody, just medium intensity of green). One year ago, the green feces stopped, but started up again after having Mexican food that gave me a very bad reaction (I thought it was food poisoning, at least it was just that bad). 6 months ago the green feces stopped and for the most part my feces are fairly normal (except for being a bit gushy....probably because I have recently benging on gluten....eating spaghetti 5 days a week for lunch and dinner). I also drink beer once a week.

As for migraines, I have had 3 in the last 4 years. I have 2 instances where a sudden light headiness comes on (not migraines) where I think I am about to faint (have you ever had a tetanus shot standing up....like that) and if I wasn't already sitting down or had sat down, I would have fainted. This was followed by a huge amount of sweating and nausea.

I'm going to go gluten free again, and will see if this light headiness in class stops. Oh, when I'm getting light headiness, if the instructor (or could be anything) makes me laugh, the burning goes away and I'm not light headed for a while.

I hope this helps and let me know if you have heard of light headiness/crossing of the eyes, associated with burning in the stomach after sitting for at least 10 minutes due to a celiac sprue.

If it helps, on my mom's side, my grandmother died of leukemia but had very bad osteoporosis (I think she only weighed 70 pounds). My mom's brother (my uncle) has Asperger