Learning to heal
They don’t tell you that you will take 40 vitamins every day for three months or that you will shed tears of joy when your body starts to produce white blood cells again.
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I remember the days I couldn’t walk and was too weak to lift my iPhone to mindlessly scroll through Instagram (damn that new algorithm). If I were, to sum up in a few lines how sick I was, please know that I once texted my best friend stating that all I wanted was to be able to run and work again, she understood my desperation. Gone were the days when I could cruise through a 75-minute hot yoga sesh and complain about how I could no longer eat breadsticks, replaced by exhaustion traveling from the kitchen to the couch and vomiting blood.
Draining blood into vials and sending me off for another battery of testing, doctors still came up empty-handed. There were talks of international clinics, possible cancer diagnosis, and questioning if I was faking it. Trust me, you cannot fake coughing up blood and collapsing in the hallway to be woken to consciousness by your dog licking your face.
Days before my colonoscopy, I took a leap of faith and contacted a functional medicine doctor in hopes they would be able to offer answers. I have been chronically ill for ten years and they sat with me for over two hours pouring over my health history and what kind of pipes pump water through my home, things my insurance company would never allow. It’s not that my family physician or team of western doctors don’t care about my healing, they do but insurance gives them 15 minutes max to sit and talk before they’re whisked away,
This new doctor sent me off for another battery of testing complete with blood draws, analysis, and hair testing. Getting tested is exhausting, you feel like a lab rat and you kind of want to die on the inside. They called me a few weeks later, I walked out with a list of vitamins and dietary/lifestyle recommendations.
Ten years later, we have answers.
It doesn’t slip my mind for a day that we only know what we do now because we went rogue from our health insurance and the incredible privilege that comes with both of those things.
So we have diagnosis’s now.
It’s only been six weeks and most days still feel like an experiment in terms of energy, food intolerances, and remembering to swallow 40 vitamins, but we’re getting there. In case you were wondering, I frequently sprint down our driveway to get the mail just because I can right now and I’ve been applying for jobs and yes, I did go to a 75-minute hot yoga sesh (and left aware of how I pushed too hard).