I’m going to be doing this challenge I found on Pinterest for the month of August. Fasten your seat belts. You’re probably going to learn more about my illnesses than you want to. Most of these will be pretty short, so I may be double-posting with some other longer posts on some days.

Day 1: Introduce yourself. What illnesses do you have? How long have you had them?

Ok, you asked for it.

Hello, my name is Laura, aka ?ribbonrx. I have lots of chronic conditions (I mean, technically GERD is a chronic condition.) But I’m only going to talk about the two that are the most chronic and incurable, celiac disease and endometriosis.

1. Celiac disease: I was diagnosed with celiac disease in November 2012 after I spent the whole of 2012 losing a total of 18 pounds prior to my diagnosis. And for the gluten free diet haters out there, I was officially diagnosed with a blood test, which showed elevated antibodies for celiac disease, and I had an endoscopy with tissue biopsy to prove celiac disease was present. So for me, a gluten free diet is my one and only means of treatment.
2. Endometriosis: I was diagnosed with endometriosis in June 2014 during an exploratory laparoscopy (which is the only way to definitively diagnose endometriosis, by the way) to find the cause for my recurrent pelvic pain. After getting worse following the surgery, I sought a second opinion at the Center for Endometriosis Care and received excision surgery there, which is the gold standard for treating the disease. A few weeks ago I had another surgery there to address what we though was scar tissue but wasn’t, but it was confirmed that my endo was still gone after 2 years, so I am in remission, which is something only excision can do.

? ribbonrx