At 42 years old, I was a “healthy”, active woman, with perfect medical labs. I have never had a weight problem and the only medicine that I took was allergy medicine, and the only reason I had begun to take allergy medicine was because I started to notice I was having reactions when I entered moldy buildings or read “old” books. The headaches, heavy drainage, and laryngitis were some symptoms I had never before experienced when doing these things. Then, I noticed headaches happened, more often than not, and they were a form of migraine (the pain was localized to one area of the head and always started with seeing “spots”). Then a progression of things happened over the next couple of years. I started having throat sensitivities, where I would have to clear my throat while drinking coffee or eating certain foods or enjoying the outdoors. These symptoms became so bad that I eventually started having difficulty swallowing altogether. The symptoms progressively got worse and led to breathing issues. This started affecting my everyday life: my eating, nutrition, and weight.
I went to doctors and more doctors! I called my general practitioner’s office and asked to be seen. They scheduled me with his new partner. He reviewed my chart, heard my symptoms, checked my heart, throat, nose, ears, and mouth and diagnosed me with panic attacks and prescribed a psych drug. Wow! Did I hear that right? Needless to say, I disagreed with this diagnosis and rejected it. I went back to see my regular doctor a week later, who agreed that I didn’t need psyche medicine and gave me acid reflux medicine. This medicine did help for a while. My “acid reflux” became so bad that it would irritate my throat while I slept and in the mornings my eyes would be bloodshot from laying down. Although the redness would subside 30 minutes after being vertical, it was all becoming worrisome. Then other symptoms started to emerge. I started getting strawberry patches on my tongue after eating certain foods, so I saw a tongue specialist. It was another clue, but never identified as any sort of official diagnosis. I scheduled tests and procedures with an ENT and Gastroenterologist. They scheduled tests after tests and were looking for big things like EOE, Celiac Disease, Crohn's Disease, hernias, stomach and intestinal bacterias. The procedures revealed nothing, and everything they thought could be wrong, was right. They kept me on acid reflux medicine, and I noticed the ones that helped me the most were the ones that had a histamine blocker in it; little did I know this was actually a clue.
I struggled personally. It was so difficult to find anything I could eat that wouldn’t give me some sort of reaction. I felt so poorly that I struggled with everyday tasks. It became almost impossible to go to our kid’s sporting events with all the “invisible attacks”, attacks that no one else would see, but I felt immensely. I worried that others thought I was crazy—having to run back and forth to the car because the outdoor environment was making it hard to breathe. I never knew how I would feel or what symptoms would pop up whenever I left home. Because of my worsening symptoms, I began to suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. I was so scared of what could happen when simply running errands by myself or if I had my children with me and no other adults present. I never knew how bad the symptoms would get or what would be the end result. I was frightened that if I passed out or had an anaphylactic episode I would leave my children alone and vulnerable.
This fight to live normally while being abnormal continued. I accepted being hungry and sick. I became very underweight and malnourished. My symptoms progressed to irritable bowel syndrome and my health continued to get worse. I developed weak muscles, teeth issues, and osteopenia. I could only eat about 10% of foods, which consisted of meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, bananas, rice, occasionally oats and eggs, and a few vegetables. I had to do drastic things like rotate my foods, so as to not allow my body to create a sensitivity to them because I was having to eat the same things all the time. I was no longer able to eat out. If I went somewhere, I had to pack my own food because every restaurant visit was a potential horror scene.
When my food selection got so slim, I found an allergy doctor who tested me and discovered that I had Oral Allergy Syndrome (OAS). It was the first diagnoses that made sense with all my food sensitivities and outdoor issues, as well. I started allergy shots, to which I had extreme reactions, but my doctor was good about listening, and he tweaked my doses. We both agreed that taking it very slow was the best way to go about the treatments. We dialed it back 75% and I started making progress after a few months.
Then I had a breakthrough! I found a doctor who ACTUALLY helped me or did he find me? In my marketing company, I had a new client who wanted us to do a video promo for him that shared his patients' miraculous stories. His patients found the root cause of their health problems and were given treatment to solve their problems. If they followed their new health regimens—they were healed! I couldn’t wait to meet these patients! I needed to learn more about this.
Our full day of video was so enlightening. I heard all of these new words like functional medicine, age defying, cellular medicine, optimum health, transformation, genetic disposition and root cause, etc.. We interviewed patients that ranged from 22 years-old to 80 years-old and they all had one thing in common, they underwent the doctor’s testing, found the root cause, and were cured. They no longer suffered! I wanted to sign up for this transformation myself, so I scheduled my first appointment. This visit was so different from all my past appointments, it was more like a business interview. I had all his recommended tests done and discovered that I had leaky gut syndromecaused by a non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
When you have a leaky gut, the proteins from the foods you eat are leaked in your bloodstream and your body sets up immunity against them and/or a histamine reaction causes you to react to them. I am not truly allergic to these foods, so once my body was cured of the leaky gut, then I was able to have these foods again. It’s been 3 years since I discovered my gluten sensitivity and I am now eating 90% of all foods again and back to my pre-sick weight. Finding a good doctor who will take the time to listen and go against medical protocol to actually “treat” you is rare. You’ve got to stick with it, do the hard things, and keep fighting. You owe it to yourself! I was sick, scared, misunderstood, and lonely. I wasn’t able to do family activities or travel, and I felt like a burden.
Please know that there is always help and resources available. Keep searching for the answers—they are out there. I am no longer sick and I do all the things the rest of my family members do. I went from feeling the worst of them all to feeling the best. Hang in there and fight, you can do this, too!
Symptoms - before getting my health back, my symptoms were
(listed in order sequence):
Migraines - seeing spots
Throat clearing - the constant need to clear my throat when I drank something, ate something, used something (like toothpaste), or was in a room that my body didn’t agree with.
Blood shot eyes
Difficulty swallowing
Strawberry patches on tongue
Shortness of breadth
Wavy sensations in upper esophagus
Pain and burning sensation in stomach
Muscle weakness and fatigue
Food allergies
Environmental allergies
Allergies to fillers and other medicine ingredients like titanium dioxide
Allergies to preservatives
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