My Story
Like many children of the 1980’s, I was not breast fed for long. I was also fully vaccinated to the schedule of the time. Regular ear aches and then subsequent ear infections meant lots of the “pink stuff”, amoxicillin.  

At the age of four years old, I began to have periodic migraines, of which we were powerless to find the cause. They persisted well into my twenties. Scents like the perfume counter at the department stores would send me into pain. I would experience tunnel migraines to the point where I could not see anything except for what was directly in front of me, and once, complete blindness. The pain wasn’t something I could adequately describe but my family felt for me and helped me as best they could. Sometimes that meant absolute quiet in the house. Only vomiting would cause the pain to release. Nothing else even touched it. Not a single drug prescribed did the trick either, and I tried tons over the years. Other times, the migraines would make me sleep for long periods of time only to emerge with a tender brain, as inertia from movement created a tidal wave of brain fluid to slosh about it my head and cause waves of agony.
I was a standard American kid on the Standard American Diet. Meats, some vegetables. Plenty of boxed and convenience foods. I ate cereal daily, with milk. I loved sweets. I drank soda regularly.

My teenage and early adult years had me drinking alcohol with my friends. Vast quantities, sporadically then more frequently. At one point I was diagnosed with depression. I tried the prescribed medication only to find it had cut off all feeling. I wanted to feel something if the alternative was nothing at all, so I quit taking them, without so much as calling my provider. It was not a good idea and I had a difficult time with that process.

In my mid-twenties I started thinking about having a child. My two pregnancies resulted in two beautiful and healthy children, but it nearly killed me each time. I had gestational diabetes with my first child. I had preeclampsia with both children. During birth, I could have died and or killed the children, should my blood pressure climb even higher and send myself into a stroke or seizure. I had to breathe calmly and not loose myself to the pain after the epidural wore off during my 40 hour and 24 hour induced births.

My health was at its limit when in the fall of 2014 I started to have wonderfully painful headaches. No matter what I did, I could not rid myself of them. Aspirin, Tylenol, water, rest, quiet, dark… nothing would get rid of it. It culminated when I had my gallbladder removed in 2017 in an emergency situation. Shortly after my blood pressure was out of control, and at the encouragement of my fire fighter neighbor, I went to the ER.

It was here I learned that my BP was in the 100’s/200’s, dangerously high and quite possible to have a stroke or seizure. I had been in that position before and did not want to be here at all. I was afraid of this place I seemed to come back to and I wanted it to stop. I had two young children at home and wanted to see them grow up. I had to figure out what was going on.

The ER could do nothing for me and after a period of two hours of monitoring they sent me home and encouraged me to follow up with my primary care doctor. I dutifully called and got an appointment at the doctors office the next day. My regular provider wasn’t in, so I saw another physician I had never met. She was in the midst of training another physician and having been a mom who had gone through standard Western medicine for both births, I was used to an audience and gave consent that this trainee be present during my consult.

This provider was tenured and asked me a handful of questions, checked my BP and decried that I needed surgery on my kidney arteries, to install stints, as the kidneys were not getting enough blood. While I respect that she has experience, knowledge and a business, I also felt like the time she spent with me was not enough to determine such an extreme procedure. I thanked her kindly, and let her know I would seek a second opinion. She was affronted, and coldly left the sterile, halogen lit room.

Now, I had no idea where to look for a second opinion. I was under the impression that for such a scary condition as I had found myself in, that there would have at least been some lab work ordered or questions about my current lifestyle. I was wrong.

I asked my social circle where they would go, and gave them a brief explanation of why I was looking for some help. A former neighbor suggested a whole health practitioner in the next city over. I made an appointment for a phone call that day. That initial call put me into an empowered frame of mind. I knew that this was the person who could help me uncover the cause of the drama in my bloodstream.

My first appointment with Steffie took nearly three hours. We spent time going over my health history in such detail that I found it a bit tedious. Then we did a bio survey. This technology blew me away. It was so neat to see in real time what the state of my body was in. Let me tell you, it was an abysmal state.

My bio survey revealed that I had an absolutely insane amount of tomxicity. My body wasn’t doing well with those inputs. Based on some of the other data, Steffie surmised I likely had leaky gut. The mucosal lining in my intestines had been worn away from my lifestyle. That meant that my intestines would easily tear when employed. Those tares would then allow food into my body cavity, having escaped the digestion process. This made my kidneys have to work so very hard at cleaning up my blood, every single time I ate.

Wow. Now that made sense but it was also scary! How on earth would I fix that? I had to get this under control, ASAP. I did not want to have a heart attack or a stroke and die.

Steffie asked me what my one goal was. You see, during our conversation, there were so many lightbulbs that went off for me. I had so many new things I wanted in my life, all of them health related. Ultimately, I wanted to feel better and live a long life. Steffie asked me, “what is the first step to feeling better and living a long life?” I replied that I needed to clean up the toxicity and prevent it from happening again. That became my first health goal.

With this very specific goal in mind, we mapped out how I would get there by starting at the end and working to where I was at the time. I now had a clear path. Each step required work from me to achieve the smaller goals.
The goals were simple, but not easy. Making lifestyle changes are not easy, especially when you are asked to give up all the foods you’ve ever known, if only for a short duration. I did however have the right motivation. I wanted to live a good life. I decided that a temporary change was manageable, and worth the effort, if I could attain my goal.

With that in mind, for my situation, I needed to strip out all of the foods that were irritating me, and boy was that a LONG list. I couldn’t eat sugar, corn, tomatoes, gluten, dairy, most fruits, many spices… I was reduced to eating meats, some cruciferous vegetables, and salt and pepper, for 30 days.

You see, your stomach lining can replace itself every few days but with extensive damage it takes longer to repair. The idea was to give my guts all the time they needed to begin functioning again like they are supposed to. That meant I had to quit intaking things that irritated it.

Armed with this info, and with some helpful tips from Steffie, I set out to heal myself.
As I said, it was simple, but not easy. The first thing that I remember was coming off of sugar. Studies have been done that show sugar is more addictive than heroin. I can attest that by day three of this no sugar thing, I THOUGHT I WAS DYING. I was so angry, and irritated at EVERYTHING. I had a headache (still) and I couldn’t seek out my regular comforts of chocolate and coffee. I was a menace to the world and decided the best thing to do was to wait it out, preferably asleep, for a few days.

I drank plenty of water and complained a lot about missing my regular diet. However, I knew why I was doing this. It was either fix the core of the problem or go back to the doctor who didn’t much care. So I slept and relaxed and a few days later I felt lighter.

My attitude changed after those first few inglorious days. I started to get excited about my next meal as all the recipes I had acquired were new to me. The Buffalo Chicken Meatballs were pretty tasty. I stuck with the diet for 29 out of the 30 days and only broke it because day 30 was Thanksgiving and hell or highwater I wasn’t missing out on that. Turns out I shouldn’t have dove in like that but after ‘depriving’ myself of ‘normal’ life, I felt I had earned it. I paid for it dearly, as introducing so many ‘new’ things to my healed gut at once was a gastrointestinal disaster, but lesson learned.

I followed up with Steffie shortly after and my next biosurvey revealed that I had indeed reduced the amount of toxins in my body by a substantial sum. My food sensitivities were nearly irradicated. I could eat corn, tomatoes and fruits again. My mouth began to water at all of the new food possibilities.

Steffie suggested that I only introduce one ‘new’ food every three days to wait and see how my body reacted. It turns out that in this process I discovered I was still sensitive to gluten and dairy. This is not surprising given the fact that both of these irritate and destroy the gut lining. My body clearly knew this and did not want a repeat, at least, not until I had done more healing. 

I did schedule a follow up with my primary care physician who was astounded at my improvement. My BP has remained normal since then. I have had no further issues with headaches and the inclusion of better foods into my lifestyle has resulted in an immeasurable upgrades in physical health, mental health and my attitude towards life. The journey continues as I seek balance and to ever improve in what ways I can.

I am so excited about being able to help others find their health. Thank you for listening to my story.