Posted on 01/03/2010 11:20:33 AM PST by nickcarraway
When doctors didn't give a Washington state high school student the answers she wanted, she took matters into her own hands.
Eighteen-year-old Jessica Terry, brought slides of her own intestinal tissue into her AP science class and correctly diagnosed herself with Crohn's disease. "It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO. "There were just no answers anywhere ... I was always sick."
For years she went from doctor to doctor complaining of vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss and stomach pains. They said she had irritable bowel syndrome. They said she had colitis. They said the slides of her intestinal tissue were fine, but she knew that wasn't right.
"Not knowing much about a disease you're growing up with is not only nerve-wracking, but it's confusing," Terry told the Sammamish Reporter.
So when local pathologists stopped in to teach students in her Biomedical Problems class how to analyze slides, the high school senior decided to give her own intestines a look.
What she found? A large dark area showing inflammation, otherwise known as a granuloma--a sure sign of the intestinal disease.
To confirm her suspicion, she checked in with her teacher.
"'Ms. Welch! Ms. Welch! Come over here. I think I've got something!" she shouted.
Mary Margaret Welch, who has spent 17 years teaching science at Eastside Catholic School, had a feeling Terry was on to something.
"I snapped a picture of it on the microscope and e-mailed it to the pathologist," Welch said. "Within 24 hours, he sent back an e-mail saying yes, this is a granuloma."
The finding impressed doctors.
"Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all," said Dr. Corey Siegel, a bowel disease specialist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. "I commend Jessica for her meticulous work." While Terry's glad to finally have answers, she now knows she'll have a tough road ahead.
Crohn's disease is an incurable, though treatable condition caused by inflammation in the intestines. It can cause malnutrition, ulcers, pain and discomfort. Still, she looks towards the future with optimism. She'll begin nursing school in the fall and hopes to have a kid's book on Crohn's disease published.
“”I snapped a picture of it on the microscope and e-mailed it to the pathologist,” Welch said. “Within 24 hours, he sent back an e-mail saying yes, this is a granuloma.”
Why hadn’t a pathologist already reviewed these slides when they were first taken? Or perhaps this was the first time a competent pathologist reviewed them?
Advanced stages of CRS are also known as CRAFT.
Have worked through the fructose thing~no problem. On the other hand, starch by itself is a problem ~ just not cut out for it.
My daughter had a terrible bout of intestinal issues after she started college. It wasn’t an ulcer; we actually had a doc think that removing her (healthy!) gall bladder (at the age of 20!) would ‘help.’ She was given a diagnosis of ‘stress’ and ‘irritable bowel’ (with meds that did nothing but make her sicker).
After reading up on her symptoms, on the web, we discovered Celiacs as the cause. Went back to the family dr. who grudgingly did the genetic test (which costs us about 1200!) to discover that we were right (we already had changed her diet).
I think my Type II Diabetic husband has Celiacs as well (and could be responsible for his diabetes). One of our other sons (who most resembles his sister/dad) also has ‘issues’ but he refuses ‘special’ diet restrictions (like at school).
Anyways, it IS getting easier to be gluten free. Just need a second job to pay for the groceries. Rice pasta is quadruple the price.
Then you find yourself in the hereafter. When you get there you wonder what you're here after.
Huh? What?.......uh.....dang ...can’t remember a freakin’ thing.....
Were there NO starches in the 'primal' saami diet?
I've read that almost every single culture bases their diet on STARCH - rice/potatoes/corn/white.flour -- and even in places like Hawaii there was some type of gourd they dug up and ate, I forget the name, but its STARCH, unlike all those fruity fructose pineapples. LOL
Let me know if you post anything anywhere any further about STARCH foods & STARCH digestion.
Thanks.
HP
:’)
If by "CRS" you mean some syndrome recognized by medical science, what is it? Or are you trying to make a joke?
I can't conceive of any other way that this story would be correct.
CRS = "Can't Remember Sh##"
Thanks, Happy New Year!
:’)
Is there any evidence on how she obtained slides of her own intestines??
Also, I know someone with Crohn’s who cured herself by eating NO grains or sugars (white, brown, honey, etc. I think she could use something from fruit to sweeten things). I think she made some sort of treats with nut flours.
She has no symptoms when she eats this way. Sometimes she eats something at someone’s home and gets a reaction because it has some flour or something in it.
In some areas seal were available and seal have Vitamin C in their skin.
Eskimos face the same situation as the Sa'ami and others in the far North.
There appears to be a limit for protein in the diet. It's supposedly about 40%, so you have to have some other form of food ~ fat or carbohydrate. All I can figure is that the Polar people are able to consume a higher percentage of protein, or their reindeer/fish/seal diets allow them to eat 60% fats and oils.
In more ancient times the Sa'ami occupied the entirity of the Fenno-Scandian peninsula. For the last few thousand years they've lived further North in the Sapmi (the coastal region extending from roughly Marshall Dillon's family's hometown on around to someplace on the Arctic in Russia past the Kola Peninsula.
During that time they've become ever more habituated to a diet short of carbohydrates ~ still, that characteristic could extend back into the Ice Age itself tens of thousands of years.
The problem for carnivores is if they have a sweet tooth (ability to taste sweets) they can become diabetic. Cats cannot taste sweet so they are not at risk. Dogs, on the other hand, can and do snack on sweet stuff but not to the degree you find among humans.
While writing this up I checked to see if there were articles about Sa'ami and a high fat diet, and there are ~ apparently they're adapted to it. My grandfather loved pigs feet in particular and would cut the bacon out of sidemeat and just throw it away so he could consume more fat. He wasn't alone in that family in doing that.
There are articles about the Sa'ami and diabetes ~ one of them suggests that a widespread haplotype (N1) suggests that a large percentage of them are immune to it ~ which really wouldn't matter since folks who can't consume carbohydrates efficiently who live where there are no carbohydrates are not at a disadvantage.
That means mommy AND daddy carry copies of the allele responsible for the problem ~ or since there are 11 different allele varieties, they each carry one of them that does not code for digesting wheat gluten!
Folks with only one copy may well be asymptomatic. In fact, provided there were no "crosses" with others with one of the problem alleles, you could go generations with no one showing the slightest sign of gluten intolerance.
Up until recent discoveries of various other alleles, and the use of genetic testing, it was believed that white folks had a 1 in 133 chance of having Celiac. In some places it was given as 1 in 120.
More recently the Finns began testing the heck out of their various populations and determined that it's gotta be 3.4% MINIMUM who have it, with many people asymptomatic until minor abdominal surgery (read: sigmoidoscopy).
The true incidence among the Sa'ami is not known ~ maybe 50% ~ but since about 90% of al the people of Sa'ami ancestry live in the United States/Canada (a figure true of the Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Manx as well) it's possible no one will ever know. In the original core area in the Sapmi some groups are reported as at the 50% level.
The situation is still under intense study.
In the meantime I avoid wheat, barley and rye products at all costs.
NOTE: I had only incidental attacks over the years until minor abdominal surgery. At that point my T-cells decided they knew better and took away my ability to ingest what gluten ~ affects me just like poison.
I buy a frozen gluten free dinner dish every now and then ~ not a regular thing ~ otherwise I eat more rice, more corn tortilla, more meat, more fat, seal, beluga whale meat, ostrich, reindeer (whatever I can get).
You can get used to not eating wheat and wheat byproducts
Betty Crocker has some $4.00 a box cake mixes that are EXCELLENT. One of those every couple of months won't break the bank.
Best bet is get a Belgian waffle maker. Get some gluten free pancake mix. Make a waffle (1 large egg, 1/2 cup gluten free flour, 1/10 cup milk, Tbsp EVO, MAPLE SYRUP ~ makes a product that tastes like KRISPY KREME DOUGHNUTS. Life is good!
“Crohn’s is more a symptom than a cause sort of thing.”
I’m sure it’s just that to those that suffer from it.
I know of folks who've had Crohn's "cured" simply by having part of a bowel excised but still the cause of the offending inflamation was never discovered. With Celiac the cause is known and all too frequently the symptoms are identical to what is called Crohn's.
If eliminating wheat/barley/rye from the diet relieves the symptoms, it was Celiac ~
Self-diagnosis, along with arguing with the death panels, er, doctors, will be illegal under Obamacare.
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