One Week

One week from yesterday I go back in to the "blood bank" as I am now calling it, to have some more blood work tested.  I call it the blood bank because I think they have taken as much of my blood as the blood donations take.  The second time I went in, they took eleven vials of blood!  I believe this will be my fourth time going in to "donate" blood.  Thankfully I did not have to give eleven vials each time!  Wednesday I will only have to give one, maybe two.  They will be checking my liver enzymes.  The first time they tested my liver enzymes, my levels were elevated.  The next time they checked my liver, the levels were elevated even more.  Doctors say that in about 40% of Celiacs, the liver is affected.  Hopefully I am one of those 40% and now that I have been very strictly adhering to my gluten-free diet, my liver levels will be coming back down.  We are praying that my liver levels will be down, and then hopefully we can resume our plans to travel overseas.

In the meantime, Andrew and I have been having lots of fun trying to think of things to do each day.  We have watched the first season of White Collar, which my Mom got quite into.  We also make almost daily runs to Barnes&Noble and/or Starbucks.  Today we visited a Scuba store in town and also Yvonne's Natural Market which had lots of gluten-free products.  There is a language program we downloaded to help us start learning some language while we are in this waiting process.  Unfortunately practicing language makes me sad that we are not there yet.  I never knew you could be home-sick for someplace that you've never even been before.  I am hoping and praying that at the end of next week we will get this next blood work back and my liver will be looking normal and then we will be able to quickly pick back up where we left off and move oversees soon.  Until then:  B&N, Starbucks and Sense and Sensibility.