Gastritis or Celiac Disease? Misdiagnosis of a Serious Autoimmune Disease

When my son was eating his first foods, I had taken notice that egg, peanut butter and fresh strawberry gave him a rash around his mouth. I soon realized that he had a reaction to those foods and stopped giving them to him, I didn't realize that the peanuts could be fatal until one day when Alex was 18 months old; a friend gave him peanut butter M&M's, which resulted in a ambulance ride to the ER. Fortunately, it ended well and we made sure never to give him nut products ever again, what we didn't realize was that over the course of time, there was a hidden disease that most people didn't know existed. This also caused skin problems such as eczema.

When Alex was 11, he became very fatigued, had severe stomach pains off and on, vomited with no other symptoms such as a fever, and he began to lose weight. Alex was only 70 pounds to start with, so the fact that he was losing weight really concerned me. He was also very irritable!

My husbands cousin mentioned to me that she was unable to eat wheat or gluten. When she would attend family functions, she was unable to eat most of the food as most foods that we eat now days, are full of those products. Her symptoms were similar to what Alex had been experiencing, so I made an appointment and took him to the doctor.

Our family physician gave Alex Prevacid and said it sounded like Gastritis. I mentioned to him that I would like to have him tested for wheat. He gave us a blood order for Celiac Sprue and off to the lab we went.

Two weeks later, we received a call that Alex was indeed allergic to wheat, but that wasn't all. The nut allergy we knew he had came back as the lowest level of allergen. He was also allergic to whole egg, wheat, barley, rye, gluten, oats, cocoa and the worst allergy was corn! The corn test came back at 95%! These were all the ingredients we eat everyday! our doctor gave us a referral to the Gastroentorologist on the referral he wrote down possible celiac.