Broadening My Perspective Around Health

As I write, I try to explain what it is like to experience a health crisis and the emotional aspects that go along with it.

It was so frustrating when I didn’t receive answers or help in the traditional way of going to the doctor.

I started my discovery process in the doctor’s office in 2012, months after the birth of my first son.

The physical pain that I was experiencing wasn’t relatable to anyone who I spoke to. I tried explaining my symptoms to health care professionals, physical therapists, Rheumatoid Arthritis specialists, chiropractors, and massage therapists. But I could tell, by the look on their face, that the sensations that I was experiencing were ones that they couldn’t relate to. It was discouraging that none of these people had answers for me.

Not only was the pain invading my life, I was enveloped in a great cloud of grief.

I knew that I needed to approach my pain management in a different way. (I had been popping ibuprofen and spending hours in bed.)

The following story is about the day that I started to change. I started to look at my health story differently. This was the day that I remember taking the reins!

In this post, I include three things that I’ve learned about holistic health, since this experience on my bed at home eight years ago.

A Turning Point For Change

I literally could feel the weight of what I was carrying, but it wasn’t something that I could put into words. I had spent so much of my life hiding—unable to use words. Subconsciously I thought that no one would listen.

I was 27 years old, in bed while the sun was shining. It was the middle of the afternoon and I could hear my parents, my siblings and two boys in my living room. I live in a modest, two-story home where my bedroom, the kitchen, and the living room are all on the same floor. Through the walls I could hear laughing and talking.

I didn’t have the energy to join in. Something distant was happening with my body. Not only was I in pain, but I wasn’t digesting my meals normally. When I ate a layer of fatigue would encircle my pain-filled body. As I ate, it felt like I was injecting poison into my body. After eating, I would move like a zombie with my head spinning for at least 20 minutes.

As I laid in bed I held my Ipad and typed into the search bar: “fibromyalgia and blood sugar issues”.

I hadn’t ever had an official Fibromyalgia diagnoses, but the symptoms that I was experiencing matched those described under the description of this disease.

As I read online about the link between these two, everything seemed dim. There were a lot of testimonials of others experiencing these two issues at the same time. But—there wasn’t a lot of explanation for the why.

My brain was swirling as I was reading. Layering my thoughts with those on the screen. Then I remember reading:

With this condition it is recommended to not eat grains. Oatmeal may be and exception to this rule. (Others had seemed to have some success eating oatmeal.)

This was the first time that I knew that my diet had to change.

I started crying, not knowing what I was going to loose. There wasn’t a lot of hope in the text I was reading, and there still was a lot that was unknown.

So I cried. I allowed the tears to drip down my face as a natural response to what I knew I was loosing.

I had so much to be grateful for. I had just had a baby five weeks earlier. Family was gathered at my home to celebrate the arrival of the baby and my three year old son’s birthday that was the next day.

And in the midsts of the joy that I “should have” been experiencing, I didn’t have words to share my grief.

The day of my son’s birthday, I made a bowl of oatmeal in the morning and struggled with the wave of fatigue after I consumed it. My blood sugar wasn’t balanced and I could feel it. A headache accompanied me as I ate. This was another symptom of blood-sugar imbalance that I had been experiencing.

Three Things I Have Learned Since that Dark Day In Bed

#1 No One Can Carve My Path For Healing Except for Me

I had been to the specialists. I had done the blood work and the explaining of my symptoms. Later I would even go into the hospital for a Liver Biopsy, with out an explanation of what was going on health-wise.

My chronic pain was not explained. But I did start to experiment with diet. This helped keep me sane, because I took some of the insanity and started doing something about it. When I changed my diet it helped with the clouds that seemed to have invaded my brain. (These clouds are usually called “brain fog”.)

I would spend the next eight years reading, searching, explaining and exploring my unexplained symptoms.

I have also learned to listen to how I am feeling.

This brings me to lesson number two.

#2 I’ve Learned How to Trust My Emotions and Begin to Understand Them

The day I read about fibromyalgia and blood sugar issues created a change. I knew that if I was going to heal, I had to let the foods that I had always eaten go, and accept that this was a part of my reality now. In this loss, I felt so alone.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the tears were tears were the beginning stages of grief for me. There was so much that was unknown.

I now know how to speak kindly to myself through the process of grieving and allow the tears come. I listen feelings of anger and rage and allow words that are in my brain to come out of my mouth when I am alone. I sit with me on the days that I am depressed and say to those around me, “I am sad today”. Not only do I allow tears, I welcome them, allowing their healing balm to wash over me.

Listening, allowing and honoring the emotions has been a link to me healing from my chronic pain and blood sugar issues.

#3 I Truly Believe That I Am Not Alone

I isolated myself in my room the day that my family was gathered to celebrate. Isolation is a complicated! I often isolated myself not knowing that it was my only trained way to cope.

Although this has taken years to understand, I now know there is a variety of ways of allowing a few people into my trusted space. These people have earned my respect and my love because they stop their lives to listen to me.

These trusted few friends that I have listen, and I can tell I don’t have to prove anything to them. They believe in my experience, without trying to fix what I view as a “broken body”.

One of these trusted people was a physicians assistant that I worked with during this dark time in 2015. She drew blood work every six weeks. It was more detailed and reliable, and it validated the symptoms that I was trying to explain. My condition did have a name. It is called reactive hypoglycemia. Although she didn’t have an explanation to the “why” she was able to explain what was happening on the physical level.

There is another vast community, that I resource, who have learned how to trust themselves.

This community includes the many authors and educators that have done their own “healing work” and have learned how to trust how they are feeling. They are those who listen and believe in themselves and so they have been examples as I’ve resourced them through my healing journey.

I keep a directory of those who I have learned from here in this section of my website.

My Greatest Discovery

Now I realize that my greatest discovery is not looking at symptoms for diagnosing, but rather looking at symptoms for SELF DISCOVERY.

This concept was foreign to me eight years ago. So if your feeling lonely in your discovery lean on me here for a minute and follow along with me through a few self-discovery questions!

Questions For Self-Discovery

Do you understand grief?

Loosing something or someone is part of each human experience. What have you lost?

Have to ever had the safe space to grieve? Or the knowledge of how to grieve? Or the permission to mourn what has been lost?

What physical symptoms are you experiencing? (Take the time to write them down.)

Have your physical symptoms ignited anger or silence and withdrawal like I had was experiencing? (These are just two responses to the physical symptoms I was experiencing.)

What are your emotional reactions that have come out of you in the last week?

Resources

In this blog post: Narcism I’m Trying to Escape From, I write in real time about symptoms that I was having and how they are trying to communicate with me.

For more of the story resource this post: The Beginning of My Health Journey