Part 3 of my health story. If you missed the previous posts you can find them here: Part 1 and Part 2. This is the part of my story where my health really crashes and is the sickest of my story. It’s was the hardest for me to write, because so much was happening at once and I was starting chiropractic school.
Chiropractic school was a time of my life that I remember the most vividly. It was amazing, challenging, draining, stressful, joyous, taxing, and a lot more descriptive words. It was 3.5 years of my life that I will never forget. Chiropractic school has the same type of course load as medical school, but instead of learning pharmacology (drugs) we learn how to adjust and take more nutrition and X-ray classes than medical students. All of that to say it’s a lot of work and it feels like a many years long marathon. The biggest part of chiropractic school I remember was how I felt. I’m sure other people can get out of school healthy or not have been as stressed going through the whole process. But my health got worse and worse throughout school.
When I entered chiropractic school I wasn’t feeling the best. If you’ve ready the earlier parts of my health story you know that. I knew that going to school was a calling on my life and natural health was a passion of mine. I’ve never regretted the decision to go to chiropractic school and know that the school itself wasn’t what made me sick. It was another piece of my story.
I rented my first apartment, started going to school close to 40 hours a week (we took up to 32 credits a trimester) and stress started to pile up. Did you know that stress is responsible for over 90% of doctors visits. It’s crazy to think how much our stress levels affect our lives. I started getting some intense neck muscle spasms (despite getting adjusted regularly), my fatigue was constant, I felt puffy and huge and my stomach was the worst it had been. I literally had a stomach ache constantly for 9 months straight. I woke up bloated and went to bed more bloated. It got worse with everything I ate. I could eat healthy food or the most unhealthy food and feel the same way. The difference was if I ate healthy food I could at least maintain my weight. If I ate any sugary foods I would gain weight rapidly. I was constantly sucking in my stomach because if I didn’t I would look about 5 months pregnant. I used to stand with my arms crossed all the time to hide my stomach and it made me feel better to put some pressure on my gut. None of my pants fit right so I became so self conscious about how I looked. To someone looking at me, you probably wouldn’t think something was wrong because I didn’t look unhealthy. That was a hard one for me because if you look good you should feel good. And I didn’t tell people how tired I was or how bad my stomach felt. I just pushed through pretending to be normal.
I was learning more about nutrition and started applying the knowledge. I was cutting back on sugars, gluten, processed foods. Purchasing organic foods where my student budget allowed. I tried grain free for a while and I have to be honest about it. Although I know grain free helped me (because I love and believe in nutrition) it wasn’t enough to heal my gut. I see this in other people too. There’s more to our health than just food. A healthy diet is foundational to healing. I say often that you can’t our supplement a bad diet. I can only imagine how much worse I would have felt if I hadn’t been eating well. But with my cravings and not noticing a difference I didn’t make the grain free switch at this point. My main goal was to eliminate processed food and try to eliminate gluten.
I found out after living in my apartment for 18 months that I was living in toxic black mold. No wonder I felt horrible. The air conditioner had been leaking and destroyed the kitchen floor. I noticed it because the kitchen floor started to buckle. I uncovered that the drywall had been getting wet for months (maybe years). Because the mold was by the air conditioner, the mold spores were all around the apartment. I put a few pictures below of what the walls looked like. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was all covered up by vent covers and flooring. This has made me passionate about toxic mold and biotoxins and how dangerous they are to our health. We aren’t taught how dangerous mold is. It can make you chronically ill and also cause many mystery symptoms. Symptoms that don’t make sense, don’t add up and the doctors can find nothing wrong with you. If you suspect mold in your home or mold illness check out this link and I encourage you to search for a person or company that does air quality testing and mold inspection to check out your home.
I immediately started looking for a new apartment. I knew I couldn’t live here any longer. So I packed up and moved out of this apartment. After I moved my chronic stomach ache improved a little bit. I still had bloating but at least it wasn’t constant. I didn’t know then I needed to detoxify the biotoxins out of my body and didn’t have the knowledge to do that. But at least I was out of the source of mold.
By this time I was about halfway done with chiropractic school. This year became the most debilitating year of my life. My fatigue got the worst I had ever experienced and I was having a hard time waking up and getting out of bed in the morning. I was skipping some of my morning classes because I couldn’t get to school early enough. I would alway describe it as “my brain was off”. My brain fog was so severe I could barely think and I was incredibly unproductive. I would get up and watch TV or do something else mindless until my brain turned back on. I would try and get a few things done in the morning and somewhere around 12-2pm I would start to feel a little better. That’s when my day would really start. At this point it was a stressful time of trying to study, cook, run errands, and everything else in such a small amount of time. I look back and wish I would have rested more. Or at least taken the pressure off of myself to get a lot done or to stop trying and pretending to be feeling well. At this time though, I still didn’t realize how sick I was. You would think by now I would have realized it. But I still thought that something was wrong with my work ethic and my focus and determination, not my physiology. I was tired physically, mentally and spiritually.
More in Part 4 coming out next week
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