Help Me Help My Mother-in-law

[sharonLmiracle]

My mother-in-law (age 72) is a medical nightmare: she's had two heart attacks, three stents, has GERD so bad that she has had to have her esophagus stretched several times, has IBS and diverticulosis, and for the past several years has had hemolytic anemia and a low platelet count. Now her spleen is very enlarged and they want to do a liver biopsy on her. She doesn't want to have the liver biopsy, and is just resigned to dying. Yes, it's that bad!

Her symptoms (see below) as a whole lead me to believe that she might have celiac disease, and I wrote to her GP and her hematologist, but both have chosen to ignore my suggestion that she be tested. What should I do? Keep calling rheumatologists, or should I call her gastroenterologist and see if he'd be amenable to doing the tests? I'm so confused and frustrated. My mother-in-law thinks that her doctor is God, and I know that she's yessing me to death when she tells me that she will ask him to do the celiac blood panel when she sees him on March 12th. Yes, she's so stubborn that she'd DIE rather than offend her GP! I, on the other hand, couldn't care less about his pride or that of the hematologist.

Here's a list of her symptoms.

[kbtoyssni]

I suppose you could test her via enterolab. You'd have to get her to agree to, well, um, poop in a bucket, but then you wouldn't have to go through the doctors. But if she does test positive, I wonder how good she'll be about fully committing to the diet. Will she still want her doctor's stamp of approval?