It's all in your HEAD

If you would have asked me even just two years ago where I stood regarding health, I would have had little to say. My life was full of ups and downs of sickness, body pains, unexplained problems and very little hope in finding any answers. I have had some great care by local doctors who I believe did everything in their power and knowledge to help me. My constant illness even became how people identified me. I was teased about it and often received snarky looks and sarcastic comments from people who thought I was just attention seeking. I missed so much school due to strep throat or what they later identified as “an infection that just sits in my throat.” I struggled with P.E. and sports because my joints were so weak and I had chronic bronchitis. My senior year was only half lived because the majority of it was spent at home with liquid diets and admission to the hospital. I would gain weight at an incredibly rapid pace only for a drastic weight loss to follow. A hernia, my gallbladder, and my appendix decided to attack all at once! The hospital was a second home. Even after the countless appointments, tests, er visits and hospital stays, I was still sent home with no answers and ways to cope with the symptoms of my body and health. My sickly self became my identity.

Over the course of school and college, migraines were my main giant that I faced. Every single time I would go to the doctor, they would say it was a female issue. I tried hormone pill after hormone pill with each one causing more and more side effects. In Middle School, I experienced my first head trauma. I was a cheerleader and I was talking to our coach in the stands. During the basketball game, a pass was missed and the ball hit me in the back of the head causing me to hit the front of my head on the railing. I stumbled my way to the bathroom where I blacked out and was found by my parents and the coach. The migraines became worse after this. Again though, I was given coping medication to deal with the pain and told that there was nothing they could do. The summer before my senior year I experienced head trauma once again. I was on a bus in Africa when we slipped off the road and tipped on our side. I hit the ground through the window on one side and four others fell on top of me on the other side. When I came to, many of the other bus riders had been helped off the bus. We were at the top of a hill and they were concerned it would begin to roll. I was helped off the bus and we waited for assistance. This is a pretty crazy story that I will share at another time, for the sake of this post, I will keep it brief. After a quick examination, me and a couple others were taken to a clinic where I was scanned and told to get back to the US for further examination. Another wave of migraines and symptoms evolved.

Dealing with the symptoms became second nature and I basically just survived with it until I experienced something new. I was driving home from a college class when a panic swept over me and I did not recognize anything around me. I managed to call my mom and somehow she understood me through my panic and informed me that I was driving through the town where I worked. I should have easily recognized this area. We asked our doctors and they claimed it was a panic attack. I moved on and it happened two more times. I was standing in the kitchen talking to my mom and she told me that all the sudden, mid sentence my eyes glazed over and I looked confused. She said I started saying that I was supposed to know who she was but couldn’t remember. She said I kept repeating that and became panicked. She was able to walk me to a chair where she said I fell asleep almost instantly and slept for two hours. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember what happened except that for a moment, I forgot my mom. This happened once more while I was teaching. It’s a truly scary moment to all the sudden be in a room of 24 kids that you can’t recognize. I came out of that episode in the staff bathroom with my dad on the phone with me. This is when we decided it was time to see a neurologist. This is when we discovered I was having seizures.

Lots of tests and medication trials. The medication helped for a while then started doing more harm than good. I decided to get off the harsher medication and try other methods of coping with the diagnosis and symptoms. I “managed” the issues for a few years but it reached a point of hopelessness. I felt ashamed for missing work and family events because people would tell me it’s just a headache and I need to get over it and deal with it.. So, that’s what I attempted to do. I was even accused by an ER doctor of just wanting pain meds prescribed. I became basically lethargic. The migraines became so intense that they mimicked stroke symptoms. I couldn’t remember the simplest of tasks that I had to do EVERY DAY. It was like each day was a gamble on if I would remember everything I had to do at work, would I be in splitting pain, vomiting, dizzy, too weak to work? It would come on so suddenly with no relief. I was missing so much work and failing at so much with my work that my husband finally made me go back to my neurologist. We drove an hour, waited 45 minutes to see the doctor for 10 minutes. The appointment consisted of him saying he wants to ablate (cut) the nerve in my head causing the stroke like seizure migraines. He told me they would just have to experiment with medication to keep the symptoms manageable. I was defeated. I couldn’t work and felt like I was just broken.

That same day, my sister messaged me about going to dinner with her. The dinner was hosted by a local chiropractors office. Me and my husband thought, why not? It can’t hurt to see what this is all about. We went to dinner, took a chance and met with the chiropractor. The first visit was a consultation. I wish I would have recorded his expression when we went over my conditions and symptoms. Honestly, I almost walked out because all this was going to be, was another perplexed doctor, right? No. They did a scan and an x-ray. The chiropractor found a bone that was completely flipped on its side at the base of my skull. We began a treatment to put the bone back in place. Oh my goodness did it hurt. But after three weeks of treatment, I realized my headaches were going away. I could sleep. I wasn’t sick. I was a skeptic and thought it was too good to be true until about 3 months passed WITH NO SEIZURES. I was sold. I began to also take part in their nutrition classes and followed their diet plan to a ‘T.’ They discovered allergens and sensitivities directly related to the migraines, mysterious throat infections and stomach issues. They even helped me battle thyroid issues that are now NON-EXISTENT. I plan to share more and more of this topic as my healing continues.

I know there are people out there who are suffering like I was. No answers, endless medication bottles that barely even bring relief when in reality, you aren’t wanting relief, you are wanting fixed. I understand that not everything is fixable BUT if you are reading this and you suffer from migraines, look up Maximized Living Chiropractic Care and find a chiropractor who practices these principles. It changed my life. Years of pain and sickness are being healed by Chiropractic Care. If you have questions, please contact me. I would love to discuss this in more detail and help you get connected. Healing is available. Stay tuned for my next blog discussing the other health issues I briefly referenced.