My Story:

 

I was diagnosed with Celiac disease when I was 20 years old, and that event marked the

beginning of  what would become a very long, uphill battle with my health. I remember

sitting in the doctors office, hearing him explain what a gluten free lifestyle would look like, 

and all I could think of was "why me?"

As it turns out, going gluten free was probably one of the best things i've ever done for myself,

as it really kicked off my interest in nutrition and set the stage for my journey of healing

through diet and lifestyle. But at the time, I thought it was the biggest curse i'd ever faced, and 

I was fairly convinced my life was over (Dramatic, I know, but what do you expect from a 

20 year old?)

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I cut out gluten from that moment forward, and despite a few public breakdowns (like the time

I cried in a safeway because I had strep throat and couldn't find gluten free soup), life got quite a bit better.

That following christmas, however, things changed again. One afternoon, I was sitting in the living room of my parents house reading a book when I suddenly felt both my hands go incredibly numb, and I felt pins and needles all throughout my arms. This feeling didn't go away for the next three days, and more symptoms rapidly built up.

I started having body-wide muscle spasms, hand tremors, weakness in my legs, increasingly awful joint pain, and problems with my vision. It started to feel like I was plugged into an electric socket, and I swear I could literally feel my skin crawling. I was in so much pain one minute, but then the next minute I would be fine. After a few weeks of these really scary symptoms, I forced myself to go see a walk-in doctor, which is when I first heard the words that have stayed with me ever since: "it might be Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, ALS, or another degenerative neurological disorder, but we won't know for sure for a couple years until the symptoms get worse."

Needless to say, I went home and cried. Thats a lie, actually. I'm quite sure I cried right then and there, but my memory is a little foggy. Either way, I didn't take this news well. I now know that no walk-in doctor is actually qualified to give that kind of diagnosis to a first time patient based on symptomology alone, but at the time I did what we're all taught to do - I believed every word he said. I felt my whole world crashing down, my whole future disappearing, and whats worse is I felt incredibly alone.

                                                                                                               After hearing this diagnosis, I started a very long process of doctor's  appointment                                                                                                                   after doctor's appointment, test after test, looking for some sort of other explanation.                                                                                                                For those of you who don't know, there is no test to identify specific autoimmune                                                                                                                      disorders - there are markers that they all share, but you can't just sit down and get                                                                                                                  a test for MS or anything else like that. They're diagnoses that are arrived at through                                                                                                                a process of elimination and long-term, intensive monitoring. But I went through                                                                                                                     every test that exists for the next six months, looking for any sort of vitamin                                                                                                                               deficiency, virus, bacteria, etc. that could possibly be causing these symptoms.                                                                                                                           Unfortunately, nothing definitive came back. My blood work all looked average, my                                                                                                                   neuro tests went smoothly, even my eye test came back with 20/20 vision results.                                                                                                                   And this is when the medical community I had relied on so heavily completely turned                                                                                                               its back on me. When no clear answer came from these standard tests, my family doctor wrote me a prescription for anxiety medication and told me to come back in 1-2 years "if real symptoms progress".

Needless to say, I was devastated. And I was terrified. These symptoms were real, and they were debilitating. And yet they were also invisible to most, and they were definitely invisible to doctors. I found myself wondering if I was crazy. I found myself wondering if I was just making it all up. I mean, if a doctor tells you you're fine, but your body tells you you aren't, who do you listen to?  As the symptoms kept getting worse, I grew increasingly scared to tell anyone about them, because I really thought no one would believe me.

To be honest, I wasn't even sure I believed myself.

This was around the time I was graduating from my undergrad, and was playing with some pretty

big questions about my future. I'd been accepted into a masters program in Vancouver, and

was overjoyed by the idea of it. But that summer after accepting my offer, I took a few trips to the

emergency room because of  some severe neurological symptoms, and I was suffering from

chronic fatigue and intense joint pains. I still didn't know how to tell anyone what I was going

through, so I suffered in silence, and quietly grieved for the future I thought I was losing.

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Despite the rising symptoms and the new-found anxiety and depression I was feeling, I chose to

go to grad school anyways. To this day, i'm not entirely sure why, but in hindsight, i'm glad I did. As

with every good story though, things would get worse before they got better.

Once i'd settled in Vancouver, I still didn't tell anyone that I was sick. I wasn't only scared that

no one would believe me, although that was a crippling fear on its own. Grad school made me 

scared that even if they did believe me, they would treat me differently for it. I would be judged for it, and people wouldn't want to work with me if they thought I was sick. There are a lot of good things to say about academia, but one of its faults is the competitiveness of its environment. I went from being scared that no one would believe me, to being terrified that people would find out and ostracize me for it. I was scared to be seen as weak or incapable, as though are death sentences in grad school. I was also scared that people would think I was "making it up" for attention, or deadline extensions, or whatever other breaks I could get. Needless to say, it was a dark 8 months, and my symptoms continued to spiral. 

                                                                                               Eventually, things got so bad that I decided, with the help of my parents, to try the private                                                                                                      medicine route, and I found an incredible functional medicine doctor here in Vancouver that,                                                                                                 long story short, managed to identify and diagnose chronic lyme disease.

                                                                                                This was another pivotal shift in my healing process, as it opened me up to a whole new world                                                                                                 of holistic health, functional medicine, and healing through lifestyle changes.

                                                                                                The lyme community is founded so heavily in naturopathic medicine, as conventional                                                                                                               medicine really tends to miss and overlook it as a disease. So I waded into this new                                                                                                                     community founded on holistic nutrition and eastern medicine, and learned so much                                                                                                                 information about healing through diet and lifestyle. You'd think this would be when I started                                                                                                   healing, but I still had a long way to go before things got better. Despite the lifestyle and diet                                                                                                   changes that i'd made, I was still carrying so much fear, anxiety, and anger around my health. Sure, lyme disease was an answer that wasn't MS, but it still left a lot of uncertainty in my life, and there was still a lot about my body that I didn't understand. And chronic lyme disease is definitely not a happy diagnosis to receive. In fact, there's an increasing amount of evidence that auto-immune disorders can be linked to the presence of lyme disease within the body, as it can essentially wreak havoc on your immune system, nervous system, gut, etc. (AKA all of the systems that protect you from auto-immune disorders).

 

So, I continued trying to heal half of the problem for the next six months, and w

hile I did make some progress, my symptoms were still uncontrollable. I managed to s

urvive the first year of grad school (with some SERIOUS support and extensions from

my professors), and then took a six month hiatus from academia. It was my attempt to

remove stress and let my body heal even more, but in reality it made things a lot worse.

I took a high-stress management position, which left me little time for self care, and

forced me to hide my symptoms even more. Then, after being so burnt out from the

job, I took off on a solo trip to Indonesia, where I was lucky enough to contract

dengue fever, and after three hellish days I was forced to fly home early from

some seriously out of control symptoms. Up until this point in my life,

most people didn't even know I was sick. I don't even think my parents really knew

how bad it was. I denied everything. And then, after a booking a last minute,

$2000, 26 hour flight home with a 103 degree fever the entire way, I hit an all time low. I wasn't able to deny my symptoms anymore. I had to

accept that my health crisis was out of control. I had become so scared of my body that I was constantly running away from it. I denied myself the support and the encouragement and the community that I so desperately needed to heal, because I was too afraid to reach out.

                                                                                                   

                                                                                                   What if people didn't believe I was this sick? What if people accused me of attention-                                                                                                              seeking? What if people didn't want to hang out with me, or  date me, or hire me, because I                                                                                                    was "sick"?  Needless to say, I had redefined rock-bottom for myself, and flew home to sit                                                                                                      in a three-month-long, self-run pity party. I moped. I cried. I isolated myself even more.

                                                                                                   I sabotaged my closest friendships, my relationship, my grad school progress - you name it,                                                                                                    I pushed it away. How could I have let other people see my sickness when I

                                                                                                   wasn't even able to face it myself? I hid my symptoms, my fears, and myself, from

                                                                                                   everyone and everything. I was scared shitless. And I was so. freaking. lost. 

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                                                                                                    I'm happy to report that sometime around February of this year, my real healing journey began. I can't tell you exactly what it was that triggered the uphill climb from that rock-bottom fall, but I think it had something to do with a combination of a bad break-up, a few friendships falling apart, turning another year older, getting some serious thesis-related guilt, and a mild mental breakdown that occurred all within the span of three days. I was on the verge of giving up, quitting school, moving home, and resigning to a life of sickness, and I knew that if something didn't change, I would never get out of this hole.So, I went out and picked up every book I could on the topic of healing, I sought out and enrolled in a year long life coaching program all focused on self-love, I reached out to my closest friends, I started writing again, and I did a REAL deep-dive into the darkest,scariest, and most twisted shadow parts of myself. I spent months facing demons I didn't know I had, and moving toward and sitting with pain that i'd never realized was buried down deep inside myself. I pushed every boundary around intimacy, affection, and honesty I had ever set, and spent significant periods of time feeling very uncomfortable and VERY unnerved. I finally admitted to myself and to my inner circle how bad things really were, and I began to face the realities of what an auto-immune disorder really entails. I stopped pretending I wasn't sick, and I also stopped wallowing in the pity-party i'd gotten so good at throwing myself. I let go of the victim label, and stopped beating myself up for being sick.

 

 And somewhere around the three month mark, a shift occurred.

 

I finished and successfully defended my thesis, I rebuilt really amazing relationships, and I REALLY learned the definition of self-love and self-acceptance, and began to integrate that practice into my every day life. I started building a community again. I started having conversations with myself and with my friends. About the real stuff. The important stuff. I started resting. And not resting because I was sick and couldn't keep up with  my friends (like i'd always told myself before), but resting because that is part of living a healthy life. 

Thats when this blog came to fruition. It is a means for me to get out my story. To share my healing journey as it unfolds. To encourage the creation of a community dedicated to honesty, authenticity, boldness, and connection. The isolation and the loneliness that I experienced from not sharing my illness was hands down the most damaging part of the whole thing. I was scared to be judged, to be an inconvenience, or not to be believed at all, and those fears kept me quiet and they kept me sick. But what i've learned over the last few months is that we all have some healing we need to do. And its a much easier process if we do it together.

I don't claim to have all of the healing answers. This blog is not me giving you the equation to heal. I still struggle with symptoms every day. I still have really big ups and downs. I still self-sabotage my healing process way more often than i'd like to admit. Healing is hard. And its not a linear, straightforward equation. But that's the beauty of it all - all healing really is is just figuring things out, day by day. Finding things that make our bodies stronger and our minds happier. And if my journey can help you make some sense of yours, or if we can journey through these ups and downs together, then this community is already so worth the years of pain and fear that existed before it. 

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Again, welcome to the little piece of soul that i've put out into the universe. I hope you find what you're looking for here, and I so look forward to sharing this unbelievable journey with you. 

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All love,

Nicole Esligar