HEALTH UPDATE
Hi friends, happy Thursday!
Part of me doesn’t even know how to dive into this post so, I am just going to jump in and get started.
If you have been here a while than you know that for the past 2ish years I have been fighting some health issues that have effected my life in so many ways. You can read about the beginning of my wellness journey here which came to head initially back in 2020.
To sum it up….at the time we were in a pandemic, I had just lost my Grandma so my grief was really really heavy and all the symptoms that I was experiencing kept getting chalked up to anxiety, depression, grief and stress. I did so many different tests and saw many doctors who gave me medicine, tools, etc and none of them working. In the winter/spring of 2021 my symptoms were so bad that I took an 8 week leave from work because I could not function.
Now, I am not saying that anxiety, grief and stress weren’t a part of it, they absolutely were but I knew something else was going on. I decided to start seeing a functional medicine doctor who told me my thyroid was borderline low and I had candida overgrowth that was wrecking my gut and causing my symptoms. So, I followed a very strict diet and worked on healing my gut.
Fast forward to 2021, I was feeling better, we moved to Florida and things were going okay. I say okay because while I felt better, I still never felt 100%. Something was just always off and my symptoms were still there.
As time went on, all my symptoms came back with a vengeance and this time, they were worse than ever. I was finding myself needing to take naps during the day, constantly in pain, so many skin issues, 30 lb weight gain, joint pain, muscle aches, fuzzy head, constant headaches, severe constipation and unfortunately more. Honestly, where before I felt like I couldn’t function…I really couldn’t function and I was crashing.
In November Joe and I went on a date night and in the middle of dinner I just burst into tears.
Over and over again I just kept saying, I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired. I am in my mid-30’s not mid-80’s but I feel like that is how my body is reacting. Like I am 85 years old and deteriorating.
I finally made a doctors appointment and decided I would stop everything else in my life, including my business to figure out what is wrong with me. Because let’s face it….I have no life, no family, no business without my health. Which sounds dramatic but if I have learned anything throughout this journey, it is that without your health everything else suffers.
Anyways, after undergoing so much blood work, CT scans, ultrasounds (you name it, I did it) I finally have some answers and apparently, what started in 2020 was the beginning of my body screaming for help for an undiagnosed autoimmune disease.
Last week, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and my blood work indicated that the cause is an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s. My thyroid at this point is barely functioning and it has caused a ton of food intolerances/allergies (gluten, dairy, corn, yeast, eggs, and chocolate) as well as my cholesterol to be high and my vitamins (such as D) to be low.
Part of me feels a little overwhelmed at the diagnosis…what this means for taking daily medication for the rest of my life and the major diet change because I am allergic to basically every major food ingredient. But, I am also so relieved to finally have a real answer and have direction to take towards healing.
I am committed in 2023 to getting my health back on track and getting this disease under control. I would appreciate and covet your prayers as I navigate this! I truly believe healing is on the horizon and while I may not be able to heal this disease completely, I can get myself to a place where it doesn’t effect my daily life so much.
Thanks for being here friends and listening, so grateful for your support!
