Ruth's diagnosis & a Glutafin hamper arrives

On 31st October Ruth had her endoscopy and biopsy at Birmingham Children's hospital, and yesterday we got the report, confirming that she does have Coeliac Disease as suspected.  So this morning she commenced her totally gluten free diet which she will remain on for life.  It was interesting to see Alex and Ruth's biopsy reports.  We were expecting them to differ as Ruth's symptoms were so much less severe than Alex's.  The main difference was that Alex had villous atrophy and duodenal ulcers, whereas Ruth had partial to sub-total villous blunting.  Hopefully because it was caught so much sooner in Ruth, she will recover really quickly.

She is in the process of setting up her own blog, which I'll link from here.  As an almost-teenager, her experiences and feeling will be very different to a lot of people's.  She is at that age where she likes to go out shopping or to the cinema with her friends.  This means she has a lot more responsibility for her own diet.  As Alex is still quite young, the responsibility is all with me.  Fortunately she really enjoys cooking, so we'll have fun discovering recipes she loves together.

In other news, a lovely hamper of samples arrived from Glutafin last week.  Full sizes of their White Fresh Loaf, Fibre Loaf, Digestive Biscuits, Crackers, White Mix, Fibre Mix and Fibre Rolls.

So far he has eaten all the White Fresh Bread - it was really yummy apparently.  It looked and smelt like 'real' bread, although he says that he can't remember what that tasted like now after 3 months of the gluten free diet.  The digestives were used to make a gluten free chocolate biscuit cake which went down well with the whole family.

I'll be updating the other pages of the blog with links and more info soon but haven't been well with a UTI and kidney pain so am having to take it a bit easy at the moment.