Path to Diagnosis Part 2

I was finally going to see the doctor and have blood tests ran. I have blood drawn every year, but it is the normal CBC and cholesterol tests since I have reached the age of 40. This time the doctor threw in extra tests to see what could possibly be going on. Of course, everything came back positive; however, my C-Reactive Proteins were a tad higher than they ever had been, but still not in the high range. Additionally, my lymphocytes and white blood cell count were very high. My erythrocyte sedimentation rate and my red blood cells were completely normal. The doctor told me I was fine. I asked about my lymphocytes and white blood cell count and he said “well, they are that high every year”. That did not make me feel any better. I love my general practitioner, he is the one who had been by my side through the entire anxiety battle and he didn’t give up, but at this point he seemed completely stumped. I left and seriously started having thoughts that I was crazy. I thought is this in my head? Do I need to go see a psychiatrist? These thoughts were not good, because for me as someone who has a doctorate in psychology and a masters in global health and has studied both physical health and mental health for more than two decades, I started to wonder if I knew anything at all. At one point my husband asked me if it was psychosomatic meaning that technically my own thoughts were making myself sick. Was that what was going on?

At this point in my journey, I really started to doubt myself. I do not like it when I doubt myself. I pride myself on being intelligent and if I do not know the answer, I will research until I find the answer. I continued reading Yolanda Hadid’s book and at the same time decided to go back and watch some reruns of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As I was watching, I came across the episodes where Lisa Rinna discusses Munchausen Syndrome. I started to realize that something was wrong and it wasn’t in my head and I needed to keep going until I had an answer. At the same time, I was seeing a nutritionist because I could not lose weight to save my life and I was tired of being fat. Again, it was something that I know about as I have a bachelors in Exercise Physiology with concentrations in Nutrition and Human Biology. I knew what I had to do to lose weight, but it just wasn’t working, so I thought if I have someone to push me or maybe look at it a different way, I could make a difference. My nutritionist mentioned, “hey, maybe you have a gluten issue. We should cut gluten out of your diet and see what happens”. I thought ok, what do I have to lose.

Additionally, I made an appointment with a rheumatologist. I had read about a few autoimmune diseases when I was studying in school and I thought, well what is the harm in getting tested. One of the good things that I had done was I had been taking pictures this entire time of anything that was weird. Some of my symptoms in addition to the gastrointestinal problems was that I would get really weird rashes for no apparent reason, my face would swell up, I would get these horrific bags under my eyes, and I noticed that I was always bloated. A lot of these are symptoms of an autoimmune, but none of them are symptoms of the same autoimmune, so, I went to see a rheumatologist about a week before Christmas 2021. Dr. Salah is amazing! If you are in the Chicagoland/Northwest Indiana area, I highly highly recommend him. However, when I got there, even though he is amazing and he listened to everything I had to say and looked at my pics, he said, “you have some of the symptoms of lupus, but you are all over the board, that I really do not think that you have an autoimmune disorder; however, I have seen patients that are like you and do not have classic signs and they absolutely have it, so if you are ok with it, we will run all of the tests.”