It was a couple months before Thanksgiving (aka the best food holiday of the year) when I got the call from my gastroenterologist. It was confirmed... I had been diagnosed with celiac disease.

I was confused, to say the least. First of all, what in the world is gluten? That was one question that I had to find the answer to. Little did I know that gluten is a protein that includes wheat, barley, rye and a whole lot more. Basically, this is when I started to freak out. I saw the list of all the things I could never eat again (bread, pasta, waffles.... soy sauce). I was faced with too many emotions at once: anger, sadness, confusion.

Celiac disease is not an allergy to gluten. It is an autoimmune disease. The small intestine is damaged, but mainly the villi which are finger-like fibers that line your small intestine and their main job is to absorb nutrients. Now when the gluten protein is introduced into the small intestine, the immune system begins to attack the villi making it impossible to absorb nutrients. This causes a huge problem that triggers many negative reactions in the body, from stomach pain to brain fog. The damaged villi can eventually lead to serious problems like the development of other autoimmune diseases like osteoporosis or certain cancers.

My main reaction to the gluten was fatigue, it got dangerous to the point that I couldn't stay awake for more than two hours at a time because I wasn't absorbing any nutrients from the food I was eating. I felt like I was dying, and in a sense, I was. After I was diagnosed, my doctor showed me a scale of gluten damage to the intestines and my case was extremely severe. I was shocked. This all started when I got blood tests taken for what I thought was anemia. My hands trembled constantly, but I quickly learned that my numbers in my blood test for celiac were off the charts high. That was when my journey began that lead me through two surgeries (I only should have had one, but that's another story).

I was always a healthy child. I had scoliosis and would get strep throat once in a while, but I was never faced with anything this extreme. Learning how close to death I was at such a young age was terrifying. I never expected to have to deal with a chronic illness during my college career, let alone during the beginning of my life as a young adult.

I won't lie to you, celiac disease sucks (a lot), but this was the first time I realized that it isn't going away anytime soon. It is something that 3 million people in America will have to live with their entire life. I realized that I had to accept the fact that I will have to fight this disease every day for the rest of my life.