Episode 227: From Diagnosis & Fear to Healing & Strength

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Speaker 2 1:20Welcome back to Let’s Talk wellness. Now. I’m your host, Dr, Deb, and today I want to share with you something deeply personal. It’s a chapter of my life that changed everything for me, how I went from diagnosis to healing, from fear to strength. This is a journey of navigating the unknown, facing the unsettling reality of chronic illness, and ultimately choosing a path that aligned with my beliefs and my values. My story is about facing the diagnosis of MS multiple sclerosis and going against the grain by choosing a different path for anyone out there feeling lost, isolated or misunderstood in their healing journey, this episode is for you. I hope that by sharing my experience, I can inspire others to take control of their health and find their own paths to healing. So let me take you back to the beginning. Life was really busy, and I was doing all the things I loved. I was running a busy medical practice. I have six businesses. My career in healthcare was flourishing. I was educating practitioners and training them in functional medicine. My children were grown, but I was loving every minute that I could with my grandchildren, and I was doing a ton of traveling and just really living my life to the fullest. But something wasn’t quite right. I started experiencing these strange symptoms that came out of nowhere, or so it seemed. It all began with this deep, relentless fatigue that no amount of rest could fix. Now it was easy to blow off the fatigue, because it was COVID, and I had been sick with COVID twice. I knew that post COVID Fatigue was a real thing. We were just learning about long haul COVID, and I was busy. I wasn’t sleeping much because I was busy and I was stressed and I had lots to do, but I’d sleep and I’d feel like I never even closed my eyes, there was this constant brain fog, this kind of mental exhaustion, where even the simplest tasks felt overwhelming. It took me much longer to accomplish things that it had in the past. Taken me half the amount of time, and then the tingling started. It began with my toes. I love to walk, so I would be walking, and all of a sudden realized that I couldn’t feel one toe then another toe. And as we all do, we can make excuses for it. I simply thought that my socks weren’t right and my shoes, so I’d stop and I changed them, and then it must have been my shoes. Maybe those were bad and I needed new ones. Or the ones I always walked with suddenly weren’t good anymore. Or maybe it was the road and I wasn’t used to it, because I wasn’t walking on the road as much I was walking in the woods more. And then that sensation started to spread. All of a sudden, it would be a brushing across my leg, and then the brush across the face that felt like a feather. My muscles began to feel really weak, and I felt like they could. Betray me at any moment, I kept pushing it aside, telling myself I was just overworked or maybe a little too stressed, but deep down, I knew that there was something else going on. It was like my body was trying to send me a message, one that I wasn’t quite ready to understand. As I tell all of my clients, if you don’t listen to your body, your body will begin to speak louder and louder to you, and eventually it’ll be screaming at you. And I knew that, so I didn’t put it off too long, but probably a little longer than I should have. I finally decided to see the doctor. And I went to see my orthopedic specialist, who I trust, thinking this is just a bad neck issue. I’ve damaged my neck before. I’ve had multiple car accidents, multiple whiplashes, and I have a lot of degeneration. It must just be a bad neck. When I sat down to tell him my symptoms, he looked at me and said, Deb, you’re a very smart woman. You know what’s going on?

Speaker 2 6:28my neck is bad, and I just need a little cortisone. I’ll be fine. When he sat down and pulled up next to me and closely got into my face and said, Deb, I think you have MS, and I remember looking at him very perplexed, because that was not on my radar anywhere. I remember feeling a little numb as the words sank in, and it was if the air had been sucked out of the room. At that moment, my husband looked at me, I looked at him, and I was filled with fear and dread, but I had to be strong for my husband. I didn’t want him to know how afraid I was, but I couldn’t help but think about what this would mean for my future, for my family, for my career, would I lose my independence? Would I become a burden to those that I loved? It was a devastating moment, one that I’ve had to share with clients numerous times, but it is very different. Sitting on the other side of the desk hearing those words, my doctor’s solution was very straightforward, let’s go get a brain MRI, let’s see if what I suspect is correct. And we laughed and joked about how he just wanted to see if I actually had a brain or not. I agreed, and I got in the car that night with my husband, not knowing what to say, not knowing how much to share. My husband doesn’t work in the medical field. He doesn’t know what’s coming if this is truly ms, but I do. We drove quietly for about 20 minutes, when he finally looked at me and said, What does this mean for you? What’s going to happen? And I sat back, and I shared with him what could potentially happen with Ms. I could lose function in my limbs. I could lose function of my brain. I could end up in a nursing home because no one would be able to take care of me, and that’s what we could be looking at right now.

Speaker 2 9:06And we drove quietly for another 15 or 20 minutes as we went back to my office. And as I always do, I put on a smiling face, and I went back to seeing my clients, pretending like none of this happened, all the while in the back of my head, truly being worried about what I had just learned. So I did the brain MRI

Speaker 2 9:37and December, 23 2020 22 i Two. I got the call from my orthopedic doctor who said, Deb, you have white matter brain disease. It’s in the prefrontal lobe, and this confirms, MS, I want you to go see the neurologist. And the good news. Is, this is early stage. You’re young, you’re healthy, and this can be treated with immunosuppressing drugs, and we can manage your symptoms. And I sat back and laughed and said, Thank you, but that’s not the route that I’m interested in taking in my world MS is a few other things until proven otherwise, their toxins, their infections and their nutrient deficiencies, mitochondrial deficiencies and viruses.

Speaker 2 10:40So I’m going to go this route, and I’m going to find out what’s actually causing my white matter brain disease before I take on an immunosuppressive therapy. He encouraged me to not wait to get treatment, but he understood, and as wonderful as he is, he shared with me his last bit of encouragement, and said, I’m here if you need anything, if it doesn’t end up being ms, let me know, and we’ll take a closer look at what’s going on physically for you. And at that moment, I had to call my husband and let him know that the diagnosis looked like it could be. Ms, and he immediately said to me, Deb, you know the most brilliant people in the world in this field, you know how to heal yourself. You’ve healed others. We’ve got this. And then he proceeded to tell everyone in my family and my friends that I had been diagnosed with MS, which I wasn’t quite ready to admit to people, but I also understood in that moment that he needed to share and he needed to have support, and he needed To know that things were going to be okay. So I did what I do best, and I began to do the research and look at all of the things that could potentially trigger ms, and take them one by one to identify what is the culprit? And what I realized after all these years of practicing, when we’ve been taught MS is tick borne disease, until otherwise proven that MS is so much more than that. It is infection, it is toxins, but it’s also traumatic brain injury and non traumatic brain injury, and it’s also a mitochondrial dysfunction. And all of these things put together, put us at risk for neurological conditions like MS and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease and ALS, and we don’t aggressively address these soon enough, in my opinion, we treat what we can treat, and then we just kind of put that to the side and wait until symptoms come, instead of being proactive and looking at the brain every year and seeing what’s going on with it and what changes are happening with it, so we can catch these things sooner than later. A $300 MRI would have changed that day for me sooner than later. So here’s what I chose to ...