I’ve been promising for awhile to write about my health crisis and how I “recovered”, but I’m not really sure what I can add to some of my previous entries, so this will probably be more of a summary than anything in case anyone is curious or god forbid ever suffers from the same thing.
To recap, back in May 2019 I started having some strange things happen to me, including the most bizarre “panic attack” I’ve ever suffered, while at work no less. I had a brain MRI and neck x-ray, both of which came back unremarkable. I continued to have crazy symptoms that seemed to get worse whenever I was at work. They were stripping and re-staining the wood doors throughout the building at this time. They were doing the work in an unventilated space above the office space and the smell from the fumes was noticeable. I tried my best to work with management, but in the end they wouldn’t allow me to work from home while this project dragged on for months and my health was declining, so in mid June 2019 I quit. My boss seemed shocked/angry the day I came in and gave my notice effective immediately. I really don’t understand what he expected, but I couldn’t give the standard two weeks notice when each moment in that office made me sicker. The company fought my unemployment claim, but in the end I won because I did not willingly leave – they created an environment I could no longer work in.
I subsequently suffered a litany of debilitating symptoms that no doctor or specialist could help me with. I spent SO MUCH MONEY that year pursuing a diagnosis. It was bad enough that I was in pain every day, but my future looked hopeless. Every single day my body was vibrating internally, I had no appetite, I was anxious at a level I’ve never experienced before, and which became worse the second a dose of xanax wore off. I could not go into public places because the lights were too bright, everything sounded too loud, and my body would just start shaking. I’d get in the car and break down crying because I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I couldn’t sleep because my tinnitus was too bothersome, and on top of that, any pressure to my head/body would result in horrible pain, mostly in my upper back, neck, shoulders, and the back of my head. At one point I was getting less than three hours of sleep at night. I couldn’t concentrate on anything so I had all this time on my hands but no ability to entertain myself. Being in the house all the time felt like torture but going out was even worse so I was stuck. I tried countless combinations of supplements and nothing was making any difference. Nor was adopting a gluten-free, dairy free diet. I literally wanted to die rather than live like that (and I didn’t list even half the symptoms I was having such as muscle twitching, burning feet, hair loss, etc).
I started researching the mind/body connection and how you could talk to your body to make it heal itself. I started doing it nightly. Around this same time (approx. February 2020), I also started taking these three items – Emergen-C, Florastor, and Genius Mushrooms and stopped taking everything else (other than liquid vitamin D). Slowly, between Feb and Mar 2020, I started feeling more and more normal again. I really can’t say whether it was what I was taking, the self-talk and brain-training app I purchased and used daily, or pure coincidence. It certainly wasn’t anything any doctor did because they had no clue what was causing my issues. Around this time I also bought supplements to start self-treating myself for possible lyme disease but never ended up taking them because I was feeling better daily without them. If it aint broke, don’t fix it! I’m still taking those four supplements daily because I’m afraid to stop. I believe the Florastor has helped my reflux and is the main reason I don’t have reflux-triggered panic attacks in the middle of the night anymore. What’s interesting is I took a generic version of Florastor and didn’t reap the same benefits. So while Florastor is expensive, it’s worth it to me (and I do get a little discount by buying a four month supply at once from Costco).
As it stands now, I still have the tinnitus, but it’s more tolerable because my sound sensitivity went away. My ears still sometimes react to noises, but I’m working on treating that with a new ENT who actually knows what she’s doing instead of treating me like my symptoms are crazy. It’s most likely a result of Eustachian tube dysfunction. Just a strange manifestation of it that all the ENTs I saw, including my current one, has never seen. But she took me seriously and figured it out anyway. Yay for thinking outside the box!
My sleep isn’t always great, but it’s way better now, the chronic pain I was dealing with daily completely disappeared, and I haven’t felt any crushing anxiety in nearly a year now. I live in fear that my health will go wonky again out of the blue someday, though. I could have never imagined such things until they actually happened. I’m just so incredibly grateful that I’ve largely recovered from whatever the hell it was that robbed me of nearly a year of my life without any answers and that I can find joys in things again. I’ve also gained back all the weight I lost when I was sick and am back to 130 lbs (whereas I was 103 lbs at my lowest) because I eat whatever I want now and my appetite returned in full force. I have been walking on the treadmill regularly to help combat this, but it’s a struggle. I would rather be overweight and feel normal, though, than ever be that thin yet sick again.
Another thing that came of the mysterious illness is a crushing realization that I’m never going to get the emotional support from my immediate family (parents and siblings) that I crave. I kinda always knew this, but this whole experience drove the point home when no one checked in on me. Same goes for some so-called friends who I opened up to about what was going on with me and never contacted me again. It’s been hard to reconcile how little I mean to these people, but now I just need to focus on how I stop letting it eat me up inside and instead focus on the people who DO care about me and show it (like Joe and a small handful of people).