when wellness isn't simple

I thought I was done. I thought that I was on the other side of what had been over 15 years of chasing health, or so it felt like.

I have been called the "sickest-healthiest" person by so many people, doctors included, over the past 15 years. While my vitals and labs were all in "healthy" ranges, perfect cholesterol, blood pressure, etc., I suffered from a host of issues ranging from respiratory to digestive to seasonal challenges and that doesn't even cover them all. At one point when I was in my mid-twenties I was on ten daily prescription medications and the thing was, I didn't even feel better. I kept saying I don't want to have polypharmacy in my twenties and I don't want to be on medications for fifty years. It was true then, and it's true now with my current health challenges, most specialists aren't interested in seeing the big picture. They've been trained to treat the system that they specialize in, and in my experience, do not have a vested interest in taking a step back and investigating root causes instead of treating symptoms.

I continued to see specialists who tried to add and subtract to my medication list through my pregnancies and during my pregnancy with my second daughter I was sick for the majority of my first and second trimester which ended in a hospitalization. I came to a point where I was desperate to find alternatives to what I was doing, because it was only March and we had already blown through all the money in our FSA we had set aside for the birth of our baby in August. I have shared here that after being pregnant with my first daughter and after she was born my eyes were opened to the toxicity of many of the products we had in our home, but ironically at that point it hadn't translated to me searching for alternative options related to my personal health.

It's been a gradual shift for me that feels cumbersome at times. I am a dietitian for crying out loud, and I know that food is and can be medicine, but 1) most people's clinical training (including mine) is focused on treatment and not prevention and 2) it's a lot harder when it's yourself and your digging through the weeds of feeling bad for a really long time. As I started switching out products in our home and searching for natural alternatives I came across Young Living essential oils and supplements and this was a huge turning point in my personal health journey. I found things that I could use to naturally support the systems I was having challenges with and found more than I bargained for in the areas of emotional support and immune support. I thought I was just given the lot of life of a bad immune system, and I've learned that's not true in the least, I just didn't know how to support it holistically.

I found so much freedom in these natural alternatives and through the community I'm part of through education and classes and support I started shifting and thinking about seeking out more holistic approaches for medical care but never took the plunge. I was feeling light years better than I had been, but I still had other unanswered health challenges. I would feel better for periods of time, but I never felt like I could get into a good rhythm with my health. While I was gaining all of this knew knowledge on the power of food as medicine (I'll dig way deeper into that soon) I still felt defeated as I scrolled social media feeds and looked at other people who were seeing results I couldn't achieve. I was also just plain worn down and felt discouraged that I couldn't just get it together to make healthier decisions.

I have had problems swallowing here and there since I had my first daughter but didn't think anything of it. I would have trouble swallowing and have to drink water every now and again but towards the end of June that all changed. I was sitting at my desk eating lunch (hurriedly mind you) and a piece of beef tenderloin got stuck in my throat. An ER visit and a surgical procedure later it was suspected that I had eosinophilic esophagitis and I was sent home with single piece of paper with a medicine to take and foods not to eat because I said I'd like to try diet before medicine. I went to the grocery store the next day and spent 1.5 hours each in two different stores, leaving both in tears. I was ridiculously overwhelmed, and as I keep saying I am a dietitian, I know this stuff but when it's you there are so many more layers.

I had wanting to see a holistic practitioner for a long time but all the one's I knew about weren't covered by insurance and that wasn't an option, until a good friend here found an Integrative Medicine practitioner that she loved and kept telling me I should make an appointment. I called, and honestly this was a total God thing because it takes months to get an appointment, and they had an appointment the very next day.

This angel of a doctor sat with me for over an hour going over my entire medical, emotional, spiritual history and you know the most amazing thing, she LISTENED and she cared. I left with two very thick packets of how to proceed with my elimination diet and felt empowered because there was a plan and someone who cared.

I'll dive deeper into the food side later, but the weeks that followed were not easy. At first I felt way worse, which is common, and then personal tragedy struck when my grandmother died suddenly. I stuck with the diet but never felt better, in fact I kept telling everyone that I still felt sick. Little did I know that I had way more intense things health wise coming.

The last Saturday in July we had the immense privilege of going to the beach with my family for a week and the second I stepped out on the beach I had a wave of peace and rest. I didn't feel stressed for the first time that I could remember, and even though it was a vacation where I couldn't indulge with certain foods it was incredible medicine for my soul. I started feeling bad on our last day at the beach, and it turned out that I was passing kidney stones. I've known since 2010/2011 that I had 10 kidney stones in each kidney (yep, that's 20 total) but they never really bothered me other than an ER visit last year. Until now, until they wouldn't stop, until I felt horrible for several days that ended up with a day at the doctor of tests. I had a somewhat emergency surgery scheduled for the next week to remove them all and to start with a clean slate to figure out what was causing them.

The surgery was August 16th and recovery was very, very rude. I don't know why I thought my tired body would bounce back but it didn't and the days to follow were painful, uncomfortable, and exhausting. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel because on August 25th I could take my stents out (you go Google that I won't go into detail). On this same day I had another minor surgical procedure to do a biopsy for the esophagus inflammation I mentioned, let's just pile it all together right?

I thought this day was the period in my bad summer of health sentence, I thought it represented moving on to figuring out what was causing me to feel bad. Oh no, not the case.

I woke up the next morning around 3:30 am in intense pain and couldn't get a handle on it. A fever and calling the doctor a few hours later my husband took me to the ER. They gave me fluids, pain meds and antibiotics and were going to send me home with a UTI diagnosis. But when the pain took a turn for the worse right before they were going to discharge me they decided to admit me for the night. Tests came back and I was septic, I had an infection that had most likely originated in my kidneys and it had gone to my bloodstream. Apparently, with kidney stones, you can have an infection on the stones that antibiotics can't get to, and in my case that's what happened and when the stones were manipulated the infection spread.

The Infection Disease doctor I was assigned said I was lucky that I wasn't in the ICU and he didn't want to think about what this would have looked like if it had gotten one step worse. Thankfully the type of infection was identified quickly and if you read my previous post you'll see I was able to be discharged sooner than I thought. I am on an intense antibiotic for two weeks and bedrest for that same time period.

This past Friday I had an appointment with my Integrative Medicine Specialist again, and I know that timing was not by mistake. I sat in her office crying for most of the appointment about what had happened this summer. Again, she listened and we mapped out a plan to get me a team of people to work together. The results from my endoscopy showed that the diet had made a difference, woohoo!, so it's figuring out exactly what it is, and doing some more tests to figure out . I felt defeated when I left that this is by no means the end of any health road, but I have someone who is working with me, who is prioritizing diet and other natural options first, and who I know will help me find answers. I read an article today about how traditionally health care in our country is run as an industry and not a service, and the gist was that the unfortunate collateral is that the bottom line is not often health. I have never experienced that to be more true, especially in the past few months of my health care experiences, but there are people who go against this grain. Being your own wellness advocate is something I'll dig deeper into as well, but I can't stress enough finding a provider who you feel like they listen and if they don't, you don't have to take what they say for face value.

I want to share my personal fight for wellness, because I want to be transparent and share that no, wellness isn't always simple or easy and sometimes you have to fight for it. Sometimes there is more to it than finding the perfect smoothie bowl on Instagram or finding the perfect workout plan to subscribe to. Those things are all wonderful in their own place, but I think so many people are sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they don't know where to start. I'm here for that, for simple steps when it seems easy and simple steps when it doesn't.

"Life is not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." -Rocky Balboa