2. Overcoming Chronic Disease and the Healing Journey: A Personal Story by Madeline

In this heartfelt and insightful episode of 'Becoming Sunshine,' Madeline opens up about her personal journey with chronic disease and the ensuing spiritual healing process. She dives deep into the initial struggles of misdiagnosis, how she found the right care through functional medicine, and the important role of MRT testing in identifying her food sensitivities. Madeline emphasizes the value of tailored medical care, the importance of mental and spiritual well-being, and shares practical tips on managing stress, maintaining a consistent sleep routine, and the benefits of meditation and journaling. She also explores the connection between trauma, such as sexual assault, and chronic illness, advocating for holistic health approaches that look at the body as an interconnected system. Tune in to gain valuable insights into proactive health management and the transformative power of self-healing.


Chapter Markers
**TRIGGER WARNING** Depicts incidents of sexual assault

00:00 Introduction: My Journey with Chronic Disease

01:10 Welcome to Becoming Sunshine

05:09 The Turning Point: Mono and Autoimmune Disease

09:02 Discovering Functional Medicine

12:53 The Impact of Diet and MRT Testing

23:23 The Role of Meditation and Routine

32:46 Emotional Healing and Trauma

42:42 Conclusion and Future Topics

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What Brought Me to Youtube?

Welcome to 'Becoming Sunshine', where we courageously explore the transformative power of personal growth. Join me as we navigate through the depths of our expe

Transcript

Madeline: 0:00

With what happened with me I don't think it's a coincidence that after I was attacked and I tried to report the incident I felt like my voice wasn't heard and I felt shut down this is why victims don't report stuff and I just felt like he got away with it my voice didn't matter what happened to me didn't matter the world wasn't safe, no one had my back I feel like I had a blocked throat chakra and then I ended up with the disease in my throat This is a big part of, why I got into spirituality and learning about these things and healing my body because I feel like so many people have trauma, maybe not as extreme as what happened to me, but even just childhood trauma or trauma from relationships or just anything really. It can manifest in the body in so many different ways. If we're not working on healing ourselves, it's going to come up at some point. Welcome to Becoming Sunshine, for those of you that know me, you know that sunshine has been an alias of mine for almost a decade now, and sunshine also is me becoming my highest self, and that's what this podcast is about. I'm here to help you understand yourself better, and maybe learn some more about myself along the way. Thanks so much for joining me, I'm excited. Hey guys, it's Madeline. I just wanted to come on here today and talk about my journey with chronic disease and how it's changed my life I feel like so many of my friends right now are going through something really similar that I went through a few years ago and I realized that There's just not a lot of information out there or a lot of false information and things just aren't accessible. I feel like when I first got sick, I didn't even know I was sick and I think that's the same boat a lot of people are in and then I was misdiagnosed for a while, I feel like a lot of my friends are going through that and when I finally got the right care, I did a deep dive into books and online workshops and everything I learned everything I could about my disease and either people just don't have the same resources as me or they just don't have the time or they just can't dive that deep into it. So, I wanted to take some of the knowledge that I had and some of the things that worked for me and share that with everyone. This all started early in my 20s. I feel like most of my 20s. I was unwell when I was in college my stomach always hurt. I was always bloated I feel like no matter how hard I worked out. I just never thought I would have a flat stomach because It was just always bloated I didn't understand why when I was 21, I actually had to go to the emergency room because I had such bad stomach pains and I ended up having five times the normal amount of air in my stomach and I started throwing up, like it was, it was horrible, just not knowing what was wrong with my body for so long. I remember I would try to do juice cleanses and that was the only way my stomach would stop hurting. I think fasting is a really good way to give your body time to heal. I actually did some fasting later in my health journey. My doctor recommended it, but early on before I started seeing a functional medicine practitioner, I would just do juice cleanses to try to get some kind of relief. I'm not saying juice cleanses are bad, but I just don't know if they're for everyone. I feel like it really depends on your hormones in general when you're fasting. I also think that drinking a bunch of sugar usually isn't helpful. It just spikes your... blood sugar and makes you feel lightheaded. I'm not a big juice cleanse fan I feel like if you're gonna fast fast, but I'm not a huge fan of juice cleanses but that's just my own opinion. I'm not a doctor Everyone has their own experience, and again it depends on your gender depends on where your your hormone cycle It depends on a lot of things and just where your health is that at the time? In my early 20s, I had stomach problems on and off for years. My stomach always hurt. I feel like as time went by, I just seemed to get worse and worse. There was less stuff I felt I was able to eat without having discomfort. Then the summer of 2018, I went to a 4th of July party and shared drinks with people and ended up getting mono. For those of you that have heard of mono, it's nicknamed, the kissing disease. I didn't even kiss anyone, so I didn't even get it a fun way. Anyways, after that I don't know any of you that have ever had mono, but you're basically sick for months, you have no energy, and that specific virus actually is a known trigger. for my autoimmune disease and for several other ones. In order for an autoimmune disease to manifest in the body, you typically need three things. You need to have leaky gut, you need to have, chronic inflammation usually from diet or whatever you have triggers that are keeping you chronically inflamed and then usually there'll be some kind of catalyst to set it off and just to set everything in motion and for me that was the monovirus For those of you that don't know what leaky gut is It's basically when Gut lining is kind of like Swiss cheese because of inflammation and just other things that you're sensitive to or allergic to that you shouldn't be eating proteins in the food that you're eating are able to get through the gut barrier into your bloodstream and you're having an immune reaction. It's just sending signals in your body to attack and it's just it's not fun. I got mono this summer of 2018 and you are sick for a few months, but it was just like I never got better. My conventional doctor at the time told me that I would be feeling really burnt out for a few months and then as time went on, I noticed I wasn't getting better. And so... I got some blood work done and she told me I had hypothyroidism, for those of you that don't know, hypothyroidism is low thyroid hormone, so I was hypothyroid but what my doctor had missed was that it was due to an autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's thyroiditis without making that connection, you're not really healing or addressing the root problem, you're just addressing the low thyroid hormone, and majority of the time low thyroid is caused by Hashimoto's. So, for those of you that find out you have low thyroid, you might wanna double check and make sure that you don't have Hashimoto's, because, if you're not addressing the main issue, your body is just going to continue to attack itself until your thyroid is destroyed and, then you won't have any hormone being made. So, it's definitely important to have that addressed and make sure that you're actually getting the help that you need and you're not just putting a bandaid on the problem. I think that's the problem with a lot of conventional medicine these days. It's not necessarily the doctor's fault. I think it's just the way our healthcare system is set up and not to go off on a tangent, but there are so many problems with it. it's not any one thing, there's so many people that need care and the doctors don't have the time that they really need to give the attention that every patient needs to make sure that they are addressing the real issue and they're not just looking at a problem in a vacuum and they're looking at the person as a whole and that's why I really like functional medicine and more holistic medicine My conventional doctor at the time first put me on levothyroxine. Levothyroxine is a type of thyroid medication. I feel like it's one of the first ones that's prescribed, which to me seems kind of silly because Levothyroxine only has T4 in it. It doesn't have the active form of thyroid hormone, so There's T3 and T4 T3 is the active form of thyroid hormone, T4 is inactive and it is made active in the gut and in the liver, but If you're chronically inflamed, more than likely you're having problems with your gut and your liver, and your body isn't able to properly turn T4 into T3, so it kind of makes the medicine obsolete. It doesn't really work, so that's what was happening to me. I was taking this medication every day. I wasn't feeling any better. My Free t3 and my t3 levels were still very low and I was gaining weight my hair was falling out. I had no energy. I was debilitatingly fatigued I had skin issues. I had stomach problems. I was starting to have cognitive problems it was just getting worse and worse for me and fortunately the guy I was started dating at the time he was seeing this functional medicine doctor for his own, chronic condition and he introduced me to my doctor who saved my life and I don't say that lightly. He really did save my life and I can't recommend him enough. A few of my friends actually started going to him and have had amazing results, and they've told me that they feel like new people. Honestly, I feel like he's more of a friend these days than a doctor. He just really cares about his patients and he's just such a good person and really cares about his craft. When you find good people in your life that not only want to help you with your health, but want to help you in general, make sure that you're your best self and want to see good things for you. I love that so much. I think that's so special and rare to find in a practitioner Anyways, I started working with my functional medicine doctor back in 2019. Functional medicine looks at your body as a whole. It doesn't, again, look at a problem in a vacuum. It considers the mind, body, and the spirit. When I first went to my functional medicine doctor, I had to fill out this long intake form and honestly, I feel like sometimes he knows me better than I know myself. He knows about all my history, past trauma. Past health records, just so thorough, so amazing. I remember he told me he spent four hours prepping my chart, and I just feel like that kind of attention to detail is really unheard of in healthcare these days, I'm so grateful. During our first consultation, he spent two hours explaining everything to me and breaking everything down for me up until this point, I had gone misdiagnosed and I was treated incorrectly. I don't mean I was treated poorly, my symptoms were not treated correctly and the root problems were not treated correctly for my autoimmune disease in particular, there's so many different triggers that you can possibly have,I ended up doing a lot of testing and I found that there was toxic mold in my system which is something that is very common, unfortunately, and it can lead to so many problems in the body. One of the main things that helped me was doing MRT testing. MRT testing is a patented sensitivity test. It's different from a lot of the other tests I've seen on Instagram or something. I'm not here to say that those aren't helpful or that they don't work but this one is patented and it's for different types of antibodies. It doesn't just test for food. It also tests for common chemicals and other ingredients in personal care products or even food coloring It's really thorough. When you get your results you have a sliding scale of reactivity it'll show you the things that you're not reactive to and then it'll show things that you're mildly reactive to more reactive to and the most things that you should avoid in your diet, it was crazy when I found out some of the stuff that I was allergic and sensitive to I was super sensitive to turmeric, which I was eating on a daily basis at the time, it's in so many wellness and health products, and it's great for most people, but again what's good for you might not be good for me, and what's healthy for some might not be healthy for someone else. That's why I don't believe in a one size fits all diet or the diet that everyone should be on. I remember earlier in my 20s, I tried all the diets. Paleo for years, which honestly, I think, led to a lot of my problems because I had a lot of nutrient deficiencies. That is also one of my root causes. I was really low in B vitamins and A lot of B vitamins are in grains so if you're paleo, you're not getting these B vitamins that give you energy and make you feel good. Honestly, if you're not sensitive or allergic to something and you enjoy it, everything in moderation is fine, I think when we have these restrictive diets, it leads to deficiencies and, eating disorders, which I also have struggled with. When I was in my early 20s, and this was right before I started to get really, really sick, I was actually, training to do a bikini competition. I was at the gym five or six days a week, lifting weights like two hours a day on a very regimen restricted diet. It's almost laughable now thinking of the diet that I used to eat. It was like ground turkey and broccoli and like all these things and I'm actually allergic to all those things. So of course my stomach was hurting and of course I was bloated and of course I was chronically inflamed. I was eating stuff on a daily basis, the same stuff over and over again, and I was allergic to it. I've also read that if you eat the same foods often it's more likely that you will become sensitive to them. That's why It's good to rotate your food and eat seasonally I never realized how important this was I actually went to school and learned about nutrition in college and we never learned about any of this stuff. It's just kind of funny. I know way more useful stuff now than I honestly learned in college, but it's okay who uses their degree anyways, right? I don't know. It's important to eat what makes you feel good and not be restrictive. MRT testing was one of the greatest things for me. It was monumental in my healing. So, you get this long list of all the foods and chemicals you're reactive to, and you actually get a reintroduction schedule how to rotate your food back in the ones that you can eat, based on reactivity, and You get this little card. It's laminated my friends kind of teased me a little bit, but this this is like this is the thing you get this little laminated card and it has your name the name of your doctor the day of the test It's color coded and it has all of your yellows and all of your reds so all of the foods or chemicals that you're moderately and highly reactive to on this little card that would fit in your wallet or would fit in your purse. I love to eat I love to go out to eat you look at the menu and not all the ingredients are listed the oils aren't listed the marinades aren't listed so when you have this little card, you give it to the waitress. They give it to the chef there's no miscommunication. They know all about your allergies and you can have peace of mind knowing that your food that you're about to eat is safe I feel like that was one of the biggest things I love to travel and I actually stopped traveling for a while because it wasn't fun for me anymore because my stomach always hurt my clothes didn't fit I was miserable because I would go to restaurants. I would eat at places I wasn't used to eating at and I would be sick and no one wants to be sick on a trip no one wants to be sick on vacation so it kind of took the joy out of it for a while for me I made like 20 copies. They're in every bag every pocket every everything that I have my friends all have a copy of it on their phone saved. It's kind of funny, but that was one of the most helpful things one of my root causes was my food sensitivities. I have quite a few and being very strict with my diet, I don't mean strict like I don't eat sweets or whatever, but not eating any of these things on this card anymore really helped me get into remission. It took two years I didn't take this test right away. I was doing other testing but once I did implement these restrictions into my diet and I was, very strict it changed my whole life. I did a lot of elimination diets when I was sick I did the autoimmune protocol. It's very strict it was helpful and I would recommend it, but personally, I don't think it's as helpful as MRT testing because it's not specific to you and your blood. I think the best diet is going to be the one that's specific to you, not one that someone else came up with. If you don't have the resources to get this testing done because it is expensive, I would recommend elimination diets. I would recommend the AIP diet, but one thing that I did notice about the AIP diet is that it is not the most calorically friendly, which I think is a little bit ironic considering one of the main qualms I had with Hashimoto's is the weight gain, especially for a woman, I was probably 30 pounds heavier than I am now and as a woman, that is just soul crushing to just feel not yourself, to feel not beautiful, to feel like your body is betraying you. no matter what you do, there's nothing you can do to get this weight off. At one point I had three different trainers. I was on very strict diets. I I was trying everything, so sad anyways, that is one thing that I did notice, and be careful with these AIP cookbooks and these other cookbooks, because they are not necessarily calorically friendly and, calorie mindful so remember that. I remember I made this it was yogurt recipe. It was like this fresh yogurt recipe made with full fat coconut milk and for one serving of this yogurt, it was like a thousand calories. I'm like, how is this helpful? Who is this helping? This isn't helping anyone. So hopefully this podcast helps someone let you guys know what I didn't know. I really went through it throwing spaghetti at the wall. Anyways, the MRT testing really helped me. Do the testing that is going to be specific for your body. Number one, prioritize that. If you can't find a way to afford it, save your money. It's worth it. Health before wealth, always. Health before anything, because if you don't have your health, what do you have? I promise it's probably gonna be the thing. That gets you better because it was for me. It was not the only thing but it was one of the biggest things. If you're not able to do it right away just cut out the highly inflammatory foods like soy gluten dairy corn cut those out and you'll probably start to feel a lot better really soon another one of my root causes was chronically high cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone and nothing created in the body is good or bad, but too much of anything is bad we have a cortisol spike first thing in the morning and that's important to help us get up start our day. It also is important because if you don't get that cortisol spike in the morning you're gonna have trouble sleeping later in the day that's why a lot of people do cold showers in the morning and exercise in the morning to get their cortisol up so that it sets all the hormones for the day and the problem with people that work shift work or they work at night like they work different schedules it doesn't mean that you can't be healthy, but you do have to be more mindful and it doesn't necessarily matter if you work at night and you sleep in during the day. It matters that you go to bed at the same time or around the same time every night and wake up around the same time every day so having these sleep cycles, these consistent sleep cycles and prioritizing your sleep is so important because even if you think, I don't have a very stressful life, I don't feel stressed, I don't have high cortisol. You may because one night of bad sleep messes up your cortisol for days, so it really just throws everything off. for me, prioritizing my sleep and finding ways to regulate and reset my nervous system were so important. My doctor introduced me to meditation. I never meditated before. I had heard of it, but I wasn't really like, I was like, nah, not for me I thought that you had to clear your mind and you had to be a monk and the Himalayas or sit like with a perfectly erect spine, with I don't know, some kind of woo woo granola thing and that's not it at all. I think there's different types of meditation, but the type I do is transcendental meditation and I have a mantra and basically you're sitting there, you just have your back supported, your head free, you can be like leaning up against a chair, you can just be relaxed. It's, they kind of joke. That it's the lazy man's meditation, thoughts are not the enemy, thoughts are welcome to come and go, just bring it back to the mantra and as you're kind of holding onto this mantra in your head, it almost kind of floats away and you're able to just get into this kind of zen state where you're accessing alpha brainwaves and It's hard to explain, but it's very peaceful and actually meditating for 15 minutes gives you five times deeper rest for your body than sleeping for an hour, taking an hour nap. So if you're tired, meditate. If you're stressed, meditate. If you're overwhelmed, meditate. Honestly, meditating twice a day or even just once a day, if you can't fit in twice a day, has helped me so much. I feel like I'm a better person when I'm meditating regularly. I have more adaptable energy, I don't get triggered as quickly. I feel like the space between reacting is longer. I almost feel like It's automatic for me. If something happens, I'm able to think of the response that I need in order to get the outcome that I want, but I don't even have to think about it. It's just my brain works so much better since meditating we go to the gym to work out our bodies. Meditating is giving your body rest while you're working out your mind. After I'm done meditating, my body just feels so calm. My nervous system feels so grounded and relaxed. I do this first thing in the morning. It's part of my morning routine. I didn't have a morning routine before I got sick. I feel like I would just wake up and just kind of do whatever and start my day. That was another thing too that was monumental in my healing. I know everyone thinks they're super busy or that they're just not a rigid routine person. I'm very go with the flow. I'm very into cycling. With your hormones and, every day, especially as a woman, we feel different, but having a morning routine and an evening routine, it doesn't need to be something that's super long just a few things every day that help you feel grounded and centered. It just sets up your day to be more productive I implemented a morning routine where I would wake up, I drink a lemon water, lemon helps with thyroid hormone absorption. That's why people say it's really good to take your medication in the morning on an empty stomach, 30 minutes to an hour before caffeine or food with lemon water because it helps the medication absorb better it is important. not eating or drinking coffee for an hour or at least 30 minutes after you take your medication because it does interact and it won't absorb as well and you're gonna feel the effects. I started with this routine, and then I would meditate for 15 minutes. I used the Ziva technique, for those of you that have heard of it, Emily Fletcher came up with it. She's amazing. I'm obsessed with her. I read her book. I did her online program. I listened to her podcast. I follow her. She's doing amazing work. Her new stuff, is incredible. I am very much into sacred sexual healing, and we'll talk about this on another podcast, I love how conscious she is and the attention she's bringing to these different modalities that haven't been brought up as much into the public space I just think it's incredible and I'm really excited to learn more about it. I will do meditation for 15 minutes, and then I usually like to journal after. I know there's different journals with prompts and stuff. It's really kind of up to you, but I just love to free write. I'm a writer for sure. I want to write a book one day I feel like, people can give you advice. You can go to therapy. I think there's space and time for all of these things, but for me personally, I'll never accept advice or feel as validated by something than something I tell myself. So if I'm journaling and I have an epiphany or I finally get some clarity around something, It doesn't click the same way as if someone else told it to me. There's just something about writing out your thoughts I feel like i'm in my head so much and I talk to myself. It's fine but when i'm writing my thoughts I just am able to channel and just flows out of me and maybe not everyone is like this, but I think it's, worth trying and I think anyone can get something out of journaling. After that, I usually like to go for a walk and get some sunshine. I love listening to podcasts while I'm walking or I'll do some yoga or some other workout and that's usually how I start my day. You can modify it, make it shorter, longer, do more things. The things that helped me the most were figuring out my food sensitivities, getting my cortisol under control, I did that mostly by meditation twice a day, and prioritizing my sleep schedule, and, figuring out the toxic mold, the morning routine kind of just helped me keep all of this in check, and it's really a lifestyle change when you're going through something like this. As difficult as my journey has been, I'm really grateful because I'm a completely different person than I was before I got sick. I heard this recently on a podcast that, the universe or god or goddess tries to get our attention and we work through stuff spiritually and that's the fastest way and if you're not listening then you know you have to work through it mentally, through therapy and then if you're still not listening, then you have to work through something physically, and that takes longer. It's more painful, usually as disease or god forbid cancer, I really do believe it. I feel like the universe or whoever is going to keep pushing us until it finally gets our attention. It's actually crazy if I think about the things that led up to, my disease manifesting. Autoimmunity is your body attacking itself in some way so Your body is making antibodies and fighting itself. I've heard this once that you don't like yourself, so your body starts attacking yourself. Stress and trauma can manifest in the body so many different ways. There's a link between assault abuse and chronic disease and autoimmune disease. There is one thing about autoimmune diseases or in Hashimoto's in particular, that is somewhat protective. So, If we look through history, back during the potato famine, a lot of people actually ended up getting Hashimoto's and it was protective because it was a famine and some of the symptoms of Hashimoto's are your metabolism slows down so you don't need to eat as much food, you're debilitatingly tired so you don't use up as much energy, so a lot of the people that survived the famine were actually People that got this disease, so It's protective in that way. The world that these people lived in became unsafe and so this disease was protective because it brought these people into the house and kept them in the house safe because they were so tired. They were so sick they didn't have the energy to be out. It's interesting the connection between stuff going on in your external world and your internal world. When I got sick and before I got sick, I didn't feel like the world was a safe place for me. I didn't feel like I could trust anybody. I had a really negative views about the world and I feel like that manifested in my body as this disease that Kept me inside So i'll speak about this on another episode, but When I was in college, I was sexually assaulted and then I was actually physically assaulted six months later by the same guy and his friends and it was very traumatic. It changed the trajectory of the rest of my life. I feel like I'm still dealing with the repercussions sometimes when I'm in crowded areas or I'm overstimulated, my nervous system starts to get into this fight or flight. I don't know how many of you have read the body keeps the score, but you hold these memories and this trauma in your body and when something comes up that seems familiar to what happened, your body reacts. I remember I stopped going out for a long time after this happened. I really started to develop social anxiety and that was like a whole nother thing. Healing emotionally from chronic disease. And... The whole process of that, because when you're sick like this, it really starts to become part of your identity. You are the sick girl, and you feel like a burden on others, it's a lot. The correlation between, sexual trauma or abuse in general and these diseases. There's so much research out there between the connection and it's actually very common the likelihood of someone who's been assaulted or abused to develop an autoimmune disease or a chronic disease. There's this modality that I've learned a little bit about. I definitely want to dive deeper into it. It's... German new medicine and they talk about the connection between trauma response and emotional distress and how it manifests in the body as disease with what happened with me I don't think it's a coincidence that after I was attacked and I tried to report the incident I felt like my voice wasn't heard and I felt shut down this is why victims don't report stuff and I just felt like he got away with it. My voice didn't matter what happened to me didn't matter the world wasn't safe, no one had my back I feel like I had a blocked throat chakra and then I ended up with the disease in my throat. This is a big part of, why I got into spirituality and learning about these things and healing my body because I feel like so many people have trauma, maybe not as extreme as what happened to me, but even just childhood trauma or trauma from relationships or just anything really. It can manifest in the body in so many different ways. If we're not working on healing ourselves, it's going to come up at some point. That's why I really want to speak out about this and the connection and just give a little bit more exposure to this topic because I just really feel it can help so many people. For those of you that don't know about the chakra system, we can talk about it a little bit the chakra system is an ancient system, it's basically energy centers that run down your spine, when different chakras are blocked, or not aligned. You can feel this as illness anxiety or disease so many different things. It's important to keep these open and aligned and you can do this through meditation, yoga, through music. There's so many different ways and I'm sure we'll get into it in future episodes, but I just think it's so interesting. when certain chakras are blocked and how it manifests. For me, it was a thyroid problem. For someone else, it could be something else. Another thing that was really helpful for me was cleaning up my house. I cleaned up my diet, I got rid of all the foods I was reactive to, and all the chemicals in my personal care products that I was reactive to, and it is a lot, it's hard work because we don't live in the cleanest world these days, but fortunately, there's so many amazing clean products out there, I don't want to get on a soapbox but there's so many things that are legal in America to put in our products and put in our food that are not legal in other countries. It's really up to us to be more proactive and aware and educated on what we put in our body and on our body. It's crazy how many people don't realize that what you put on your skin is just as important as what you put inside your body. At least when you're consuming food there are other things working in your body to take out the toxins before it gets in your bloodstream but if you rub something on your skin, there's there's nothing stopping it. It goes straight into your bloodstream, so you can almost have a worse reaction from something that you're sensitive to or allergic to. I'll definitely have an episode dedicated to clean beauty and clean household products It's great that people are more educated these days and more excited and consumers are investing their dollars to make change and we're getting better products on the market one thing I do love and is really helpful is the EWG app you can download it on your phone and you can look up different products and see what their rating is whether it's rated really clean and then it'll show you like the worst the worst products. You can also scan the barcode a lot of times right at the store and it'll tell you whether or not It's a safe product for you and your family. So that is a really good feature. Highly recommend One thing my doctor told me is that all diseased really stems from autoimmunity I feel like in today's world when we're chronically inflamed and chronically ill because of the food or the lifestyle we have. It's so hard sometimes to know what's going on with us because the symptoms are just so vague. I would have heart palpitations and cognitive problems. I remember one time I was watching TV with my boyfriend we were watching a show and I was embarrassed. I didn't want to tell him that I had to re watch it later when I was feeling better because I couldn't understand what was going on in the show and for someone that's been relatively healthy and takes care of herself my whole life, it was really scary to be having these problems. I remember one day I woke up and there was blood on my pillow, I was bleeding from my ears and it's just... so scary when you know you don't know what's wrong with you and you feel like your body's betraying you I had memory problems. I had muscle wasting at one point. I lost 12 pounds of muscle that's another symptom of being sick, you're unable to put on muscle and fat goes up and it's so hard to lose weight, especially with thyroid problems. If you are a man or a woman with thyroid problems, it really affects everything. It affects your hormones. It affects your psychologically. So many people are misdiagnosed with a psychological disorder when really they just have thyroid problems. That's another thing I'm very passionate about I love the holistic psychologist on Instagram. That's her username. I love her books, I love her work. She was a traditional psychologist for years and she talks about how people are misdiagnosed all the time just because, they are just not healed. They're overworked, they're depressed because they're barely able to make ends meet or they have some other health problem going on and so much is just overlooked. So much is just over prescribed and it really is an epidemic and it's up to us and people like me that can share their stories and help educate people and people being curious about their own health and wanting to take action and not take a back seat and wait until they get to the point where they're debilitatingly sick. Luckily I had a very flexible job at the time and I had an amazing boyfriend that was very supportive he really helped make sure I got the help that I needed and connected me to the right people and just held so much space for me. I never felt like a burden. He always made me feel beautiful even when I didn't. I think having someone in your corner like that is so important I'll always be really grateful. I talked about so much on this episode and there's definitely more I can get into and more I want to touch upon in future episodes. I feel like people that have gone through this know what I'm talking about and people that are going through this. There's so much more nuanced and just assimilating back into normal life after going through something like this because I'm not the person I was before I got sick I'm not the person I was when I was sick and figuring out who that person is now is It's a journey in itself and I can't wait to get into it on future episodes and thank you guys so much for listening. I appreciate all of you and send you my love. Hey guys, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode, remember to comment, like, and subscribe. Share it with your friends. It really does help me. You can also go to my website at becomingsunshine. com and subscribe to my newsletter. You can support the podcast there. Thanks again. I appreciate you guys so much and we'll talk soon. Bye!