When the Dam Broke
This is when everything began to unravel. Symptoms stacked up and life got a lot smaller.
The floodgates burst open in late 2018. I started feeling even more fatigued and gained 35 pounds in six months with no explanation - about 1.5 pounds a week without changing my diet or exercise. I had just turned 40 that year and thought maybe it was hormones. However, on top of that, a whole new wave of random things started happening. I was constantly getting colds and flus, I developed acid reflux, there was blood in my stool, I got pink eye, and then shingles on my back. Then I started having so much pain in my abdomen that I ended up in the ER thinking it was my appendix. It turned out to be a peptic ulcer, and they also found that my pancreas was inflamed and I had NAFL (non-alcoholic fatty liver).
I found a doctor specializing in women's health who looked at my hormones, and while those came back fine, she did find that I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition of the thyroid. I had been diagnosed with hypothyroidism when I was younger, but now it was Hashimoto’s, and my TPO antibodies were in the 200's. She also said she had never seen someone’s vitamin D levels so low in her entire career. At this point, I thought maybe this was the answer - the Hashimotos…because the thyroid gland regulates so many systems in the body. But I just kept getting worse.
Here is my full Symptoms list, as these were all happening at this point through the next couple of years - some on and off, some constant 24/7 - and it’s important to show how much things had deteriorated by the time I finally found someone who was determined to help me and uncover the root causes.
I don’t remember how I found out about functional medicine. It may have been recommended by the hormone doctor. Either way, by the time I got an appointment with a functional medicine doctor, I was in really bad shape. My first visit was in early 2020, and for the first time, I felt seen, heard, understood, and believed. She knew I was in rough shape, and she did not treat me like I was making any of it up. She immediately started testing from a root-cause perspective, ruling things out one by one to get to the bottom of what was actually happening. We checked for Lupus, Sjogren's disease, Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder, and many other things I don’t even remember. The list kept getting shorter until we got to Multiple Sclerosis, which terrified me, and then Lyme disease was the last thing on the list.
So off I went and had four MRIs on my full spine and brain to check for lesions, and none were found. Then we did Lyme testing through regular bloodwork, and that came back negative. Because we all know how unreliable basic testing is for Lyme disease, I had to test again, this time with the IGeneX test, and it came back positive for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. I remember being relived is wasn't Multiple Sclerosis but I had never heard of Lyme disease before and had no idea what it was... but boy, was I about to find out!
