We just got back from a beach vacation with my in-laws, where I, in true spoonie fashion, ended up having to spend much of the time in our (very nice) room. I made it to the ocean twice the roughly five days we were there, only once to actually get in it, and spent the days following each trying to recover. I couldn't help half-hoping that the next time I go to the beach, whenever that is, will be completely different from this and the last time I went, the only two times I've been to the beach since becoming so sick.
But meanwhile the time has come for another update:
As if it was not already clear as day to me that Fibromyalgia is just a label that doctors give to people with more problems than they can or want to attempt to help, a conclusion I arrived at with my first go-round with the functional medicine approach in 2013, I even more firmly believe so now. There are so many things wrong with me that to think they could all just be summed up with "Fibromyalgia" is just absurd.
Just to briefly catch you up:
- I saw a functional medicine doctor back in fall 2013 for the first time for approximately six months of treatment until we moved. While most of his patients vastly improve, including my mother who has an amazing success story, I was one of those rare ones who just did not respond to treatment like we'd all hoped and expected. He admitted that I was the most difficult case he'd ever seen. Turns out that's because I'm extra sick.
- Since we moved, we have now begun treatment with another--brilliant--functional medicine doctor three hours away. You can read more about this decision in my first health update and the tests I've had done to begin treatment with this doctor in my most recent health update. And now that we've discovered umpteen new issues that my last doctor didn't catch, we now see why that treatment did not bring the results it should have--I had a lot more to treat that we didn't even know about.
So here is where we stand now:
I was able to finally go back and get the 12 vials of blood retaken three weeks later--on our 3rd anniversary--and those results thankfully came through fine. But in an odd twist, it turns out the first results were actually somewhat reliable, so we have theconfusion benefit of two sets of results for the cost of one. Lucky me! My hair test results for metal poisoning have also come back. We are still awaiting results to determine all of my gene mutations, along with a test for thyroid and hormone issues. I also had my first round of QRA and Field Control Therapy done, to determine what organs have what issues and what needs to be done about them.
While I thankfully do not have Lupus, Epstein Barr, or Rheumatoid Arthritis, though I am currently headed toward the latter in the future if not addressed, we have found tons of issues and haven't even finished all of the testing that will be done, such as checking for past head trauma. For now, in addition to many, many, many smaller, harder to list issues like thyroid, iron, white blood cell, B-12, Vitamin D levels, adrenals, ph imbalances, and possible hypoglycemia, etc., we have found the following:
- I have serious autoimmune issues--my soldiers are in overdrive because of infections and so are overworked and attacking everything.
- While I do not have classic Lyme Disease, I do have a Lyme co-infection, Babesia, likely contracted from a tick bite, spider bite, etc., at some point. I pretty confidently am going to point to one of two rather suspicious bug bites I had when I was around 12 years old. This infection is at least attacking my liver, if not more, which we will determine in the future.
- I have a virus lodged in my gut, likely leftovers from chicken pox, which I had when I was 5 years old.
- I am being/have been exposed to petroleum and am reacting to it, of all things (it's actually in much more common items than you'd think), as it is attacking my uterus and possibly more, which we'll determine down the road.
- I have Leaky Gut Syndrome and likely Celiac Disease, the former of which will be treated with a different supplement than I used last time, as the QRA testing revealed my body does not respond to Repairvite--that's why it didn't work.
- I have mercury poisoning. While most people's culprit for that is amalgam fillings, I don't have those--my assumed culprits are childhood vaccines containing mercury and spending much of my childhood at my grandfather's dentist office, where my mother was his dental hygienist, so I was frequently exposed to the fumes.
As I mentioned, gene mutations and hormone issue results are pending, along with a test for past head trauma/concussion in the future.
What's next is three intense days of several powerful treatments of my infections beginning this Wednesday and several on-going supplements to address my other issues, with more QRA and FCT testing in a month to see how we're doing, at which point I'll also begin repairing my leaky gut--hopefully successfully this time.
It is rather shocking to me to think that I have Babesia and mercury poisoning, for example, and likely have for years and just never knew that was what was wrong with me. It almost makes me upset, like, Why didn't we seek treatment for this sooner? But the truth is that the diagnostic tools and treatments I'm doing are more recent developments and weren't really being offered years ago. So there's nothing I could have done. We've gotten on this path to treatment as fast as we possibly could have.
It's also a legitimate question to ask what virus/infection came first/where all this even came from. And we don't really know--the point is that we know these problems are there and we're going to do everything we can to remove/suppress them to get my body to its maximum functioning potential. But since it's my body and history we're talking about, I have to guess-reason through it all just for my own sanity. And in my limited understanding I would think I started out with gene mutations, obviously, from the start (we know I have one and are waiting to hear on others, but I would bet money we'll find I have more) that already had my body not functioning correctly, followed by mercury poisoning that further weakened me, with chicken pox coming during that continuous poisoning that lasted all through the first ten or so years of my life, followed by the bite that gave me Babesia, and by that time I was just too weakened to fight what I had and anything new that came along. It all really makes me wonder how I function at all, and also pretty well indicates if I'd not sought this treatment, I would simply continue to worsen over time, until who-knows-what happened.
Right now, this treatment process seems so. horribly. long. But that's how it seemed the last go-round, and it went by eventually. Plus we have a much better chance of actually helping my majorly sick body than we did last time, simply because we're finding so many new issues we didn't even test for before. I feel like last time we just scratched the surface of my issues, and this time we're going to dig and dig until we get all the answers.
I hope to write a post on an emotional aspect of all of this at some point but wanted to update you all with what we know so far. And if you don't hear from me for a while, you'll know it's because I'm hunkered down getting through these first treatments. I am just thankful for answers at this point--now to do more waiting to see if doing what I'm told will yield results this time around.
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As if it was not already clear as day to me that Fibromyalgia is just a label that doctors give to people with more problems than they can or want to attempt to help, a conclusion I arrived at with my first go-round with the functional medicine approach in 2013, I even more firmly believe so now. There are so many things wrong with me that to think they could all just be summed up with "Fibromyalgia" is just absurd.
Just to briefly catch you up:
- I saw a functional medicine doctor back in fall 2013 for the first time for approximately six months of treatment until we moved. While most of his patients vastly improve, including my mother who has an amazing success story, I was one of those rare ones who just did not respond to treatment like we'd all hoped and expected. He admitted that I was the most difficult case he'd ever seen. Turns out that's because I'm extra sick.
- Since we moved, we have now begun treatment with another--brilliant--functional medicine doctor three hours away. You can read more about this decision in my first health update and the tests I've had done to begin treatment with this doctor in my most recent health update. And now that we've discovered umpteen new issues that my last doctor didn't catch, we now see why that treatment did not bring the results it should have--I had a lot more to treat that we didn't even know about.
So here is where we stand now:
I was able to finally go back and get the 12 vials of blood retaken three weeks later--on our 3rd anniversary--and those results thankfully came through fine. But in an odd twist, it turns out the first results were actually somewhat reliable, so we have the
While I thankfully do not have Lupus, Epstein Barr, or Rheumatoid Arthritis, though I am currently headed toward the latter in the future if not addressed, we have found tons of issues and haven't even finished all of the testing that will be done, such as checking for past head trauma. For now, in addition to many, many, many smaller, harder to list issues like thyroid, iron, white blood cell, B-12, Vitamin D levels, adrenals, ph imbalances, and possible hypoglycemia, etc., we have found the following:
- I have serious autoimmune issues--my soldiers are in overdrive because of infections and so are overworked and attacking everything.
- While I do not have classic Lyme Disease, I do have a Lyme co-infection, Babesia, likely contracted from a tick bite, spider bite, etc., at some point. I pretty confidently am going to point to one of two rather suspicious bug bites I had when I was around 12 years old. This infection is at least attacking my liver, if not more, which we will determine in the future.
- I have a virus lodged in my gut, likely leftovers from chicken pox, which I had when I was 5 years old.
- I am being/have been exposed to petroleum and am reacting to it, of all things (it's actually in much more common items than you'd think), as it is attacking my uterus and possibly more, which we'll determine down the road.
- I have Leaky Gut Syndrome and likely Celiac Disease, the former of which will be treated with a different supplement than I used last time, as the QRA testing revealed my body does not respond to Repairvite--that's why it didn't work.
- I have mercury poisoning. While most people's culprit for that is amalgam fillings, I don't have those--my assumed culprits are childhood vaccines containing mercury and spending much of my childhood at my grandfather's dentist office, where my mother was his dental hygienist, so I was frequently exposed to the fumes.
As I mentioned, gene mutations and hormone issue results are pending, along with a test for past head trauma/concussion in the future.
What's next is three intense days of several powerful treatments of my infections beginning this Wednesday and several on-going supplements to address my other issues, with more QRA and FCT testing in a month to see how we're doing, at which point I'll also begin repairing my leaky gut--hopefully successfully this time.
It is rather shocking to me to think that I have Babesia and mercury poisoning, for example, and likely have for years and just never knew that was what was wrong with me. It almost makes me upset, like, Why didn't we seek treatment for this sooner? But the truth is that the diagnostic tools and treatments I'm doing are more recent developments and weren't really being offered years ago. So there's nothing I could have done. We've gotten on this path to treatment as fast as we possibly could have.
It's also a legitimate question to ask what virus/infection came first/where all this even came from. And we don't really know--the point is that we know these problems are there and we're going to do everything we can to remove/suppress them to get my body to its maximum functioning potential. But since it's my body and history we're talking about, I have to guess-reason through it all just for my own sanity. And in my limited understanding I would think I started out with gene mutations, obviously, from the start (we know I have one and are waiting to hear on others, but I would bet money we'll find I have more) that already had my body not functioning correctly, followed by mercury poisoning that further weakened me, with chicken pox coming during that continuous poisoning that lasted all through the first ten or so years of my life, followed by the bite that gave me Babesia, and by that time I was just too weakened to fight what I had and anything new that came along. It all really makes me wonder how I function at all, and also pretty well indicates if I'd not sought this treatment, I would simply continue to worsen over time, until who-knows-what happened.
Right now, this treatment process seems so. horribly. long. But that's how it seemed the last go-round, and it went by eventually. Plus we have a much better chance of actually helping my majorly sick body than we did last time, simply because we're finding so many new issues we didn't even test for before. I feel like last time we just scratched the surface of my issues, and this time we're going to dig and dig until we get all the answers.
I hope to write a post on an emotional aspect of all of this at some point but wanted to update you all with what we know so far. And if you don't hear from me for a while, you'll know it's because I'm hunkered down getting through these first treatments. I am just thankful for answers at this point--now to do more waiting to see if doing what I'm told will yield results this time around.
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