Discovering My Adrenal Disorder

Even though this blog is mainly based on disorders and diseases involving gluten intolerances and Celiac Disease, I felt like that I should share my entire story since discovering Celiac Disease was only one half. Most of you probably do not know what an Adrenal Disorder is and what it affects. Before I got diagnosed I had no idea what it was either and how critical it was to living your every day life. This is the other half of my story and journey on getting back to a healthy life style, and being lucky to be alive today.

After about 1 month of being on a gluten free diet and discovering that I had Celiac, things seemed like they were starting to get better and back on track. My stomach pains seemed to be fixed, my headaches were not as consistent, but the one major thing that wasn't right was my energy. I still noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to wake up in the morning and I was starting to get worried. I didn't make that big deal out of it and thought it was still just apart of the recovery stage from my Celiac Disease. I was wrong. One day in school close to the end of April in 2011, I completely lost vision in my right eye, I got very sweaty, nauseous, dizzy, had trouble walking, memory loss, and at one point couldn't even communicate what I wanted to say. With out knowing, I blacked out in the school bathroom for 45 minutes and was taken to the hospital.

Doctor after doctor, test after test, I was never given an answer. I was told I was fine even though I knew this wasn't true and the symptoms continued to happen. My entire life I have been active and played sports. It got to the point where I couldn't physically play sports and do the things I wanted anymore. Being as active as I was, this devastated me. I was tired of dealing with theses symptoms day after day without receiving one possible answer. Although this disorder has caused me to forget most of the summer of 2011, what I do remember is how miserable I was. It's a feeling I can't even explain besides feeling dead. All I remember was feeling this way, inside and out, and not being able to go do a single thing that entire summer. That summer to this day was the worst summer of my life.

It was October of 2011 and I was fed up with being told over and over again that I was crazy, healthy, and  have nothing to worry about. I knew something was wrong and I had to get to the bottom of it. At that point I was about done and was just looking and hoping that maybe, just maybe I would finally get an answer to solve all my problems. But that's not how life works.  I was scheduled to stay in the hospital for only two days to get a series of tests done, but ended up staying for over a week. After having to drink the worst liquid of my life, get every test you could possibly think of done, and go through two surgeries, I got the results back.  Again I was told that there was nothing wrong, and that there was nothing they could find or worry about.

I started to question if I really was crazy, and if I really was imagining these things that I felt everyday. The doctors said they were going to run 1 more test from my blood samples and then I would be on my way. Although I was so excited to finally get out of that place, I could never be so grateful that I stayed 1 hour longer. What the doctors told me next had changed my life forever and how I viewed everything in it. The doctors came back and explained to me that I have a very rare and life threatening Adrenal Disorder. They said there was no cure and that I would have to live with it and treat it forever. I was told I am incredibly lucky to be alive and I would of only had 3 months to live if they didn't catch it. I would have to follow a strict diet and take multiple drugs every day for the rest of my life. But out of all the things they told me, the one thing they told me that mattered the most was...I was going to live.

It was all so much to take in, being told at age 14 that I would have had only had 3 months to live if I would of left one hour sooner. Usually it's not something you would take lightly but really all I could think about was that I was finally going to be better, finally going to be healthy, and finally going to be able to do the normal things a high schooler could do. I really didn't take in how much happened and what it all meant for the rest of my life. but that was something I would need to learn and need to learn fast. Later on I started to realize how long this road was, and how it was only going to get longer. See how I'm living with it today.