A friend of mine recently asked me to write a distilled version of my journey to health (boy that sounds hokey). My health journey. The long and arduous road that I took to finally not being at the mercy of any random doctor.
Also know as one of the best things I’ve done with my life.
I figured I’d try out a version here. We’ve talked enough about my recent health developments that you could use some backstory.
I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was six years old. That’s not very old, in the scheme of things, especially when you consider that most people are diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when they are more like 18 years old.
This doesn’t sound like a problem, but it does complicate things. For one, there are fewer pediatric gastroenterologists who know anything about small children with the disease. And two, there are a lot fewer resources from which to learn anything, especially if you’re a parent whose child now has an uncurable disease.
And what does one do when thrust into this situation? One listens to the doctor, of course. And really, why shouldn’t you? They’ve been trained to handle this, they have mountains of evidence and papers on their side, and they have An Answer held out to you on a silver platter.
This particular answer was Prednisone. I was prescribed a 60 mg dose of Prednisone as a six year old child. 60mg!! I was prescribed 90 mg when I had pneumonia as an ADULT. Can you imagine what that does to a child? Reader, I hallucinated. Practically crawled out of my skin.
Perhaps that has something to do with my utter disinterest in psychedelic drugs as an adult.
Anyway, my parents and I muddled our way through my childhood and early teen years. We saw specialists at the children’s hospital, consulted dietitians, went to Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America-sponsored seminars, but I ended up “graduating” from my pediatric gastroenterologist to an adult gastro at age 13.
That was the immunosuppressant era. My immune system would be suppressed for the next 16 years. I took my first imuran at 13 and did my last Remicade at 29, so…yeah. That’s a long time to be without an immune system.
For the record, I don’t recommend it.
However, getting immune suppressed allowed me to finish high school like a normal person and go on to college without worry about my health all the time. I could get away with eating like trash, so I did. My last year, I’m pretty sure 75% of my diet consisted of Cheez-its and chocolate that were smuggled into the computer lab.
In grad school, though, I had this feeling that something would have to change. I was tired of getting IV infusions all the time, and of being worried about insurance costs. It got worse when I graduated and started supporting myself—wiping out my entire savings to cover one infusion before the subsidy kicked in, taking the first job I was offered because it had stellar employer-sponsored coverage.
Insurance wasn’t what made me change my life, but it definitely provided incentive.
At one point, when I was doing a new consult with a naturopath, I told him that it was my goal to get off of Remicade, the IV immunosuppressant I was on at the time. And then it just slipped out: I wanted to get off insurance, too.
“Oh, no, that’ll never happen,” the doctor said. (He wasn’t my doctor for very long, tbh.)
Frankly, what I meant was that I didn’t want to be dependent on insurance, or owned by insurance. I wanted to get to a place where I could survive without insurance if I had to. At that point, it seemed like a complete impossibility. I stopped thinking about it.
What I did think about was my diet. I tried all sorts of approaches: the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, IgG/IgE allergen testing with a rotational diet, paleo (sometimes with the 80/20 stipulation), paleo autoimmune, low-FODMAP, and eventually all of them put together.
Doing work on my diet meant that I needed some expert help, which is why I had started seeing naturopaths. I started to research more than just diet, and strongly suspected I had Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO). When my normal gastroenterologist just shrugged off my questions, I basically walked away from the MDs straight into the arms of the NDs.
From there, I tackled SIBO head on and started the (painful) process of ridding myself of 16 years’ worth of built-up bacteria. It was not a fun couple of years, but that work had to be done.
I quit all but one of my prescription drugs, and lived a normal life for a while.
But let me tell you something about bacteria colonies—they don’t like to die. They will craftily devise plans to NOT DIE. So you must fight them, aggressively.
Somewhere in the middle of trying the keto diet, almost completely losing control of my bowels, and still struggling to rid myself of bacteria, I learned that it was okay to only eat meat.
I cannot describe to you the depths of RELIEF that I felt those first few weeks as a pure carnivore.
No more angst about vegetables—which to eat and how to prepare them, and how much fiber is enough, and if I try this new thing how might my body react and in what proximity to a toilet do I have to hover for the next several hours?—all of that, gone.
Carnivory was not the 100% answer. I did not magically heal overnight.
I’m still healing, still having less-than-stellar bowel movements, still struggling with bacteria.
But my eczema has decreased to almost nil. I have control over my bowels again. When I’m rested, and not stressed, things almost return to normal. I have the confidence to live my life, and I know that things are heading in the right direction. I can feel it in my bones, and in the energy I have that I’ve never had before.
There are still things I’m tweaking. I need to learn how to reduce my overall stress levels and sleep more. Not everything is diet.
My health is not perfect yet, but I’m finally in a place where I don’t worry about insurance. I don’t have to. All my treatments are food or they’re completely free.
I have achieved that impossible goal.
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