My Lyme disease journey

So… how did I become so passionate about the power of wellness and holistic healing in the first place? 

Plain and simple, it starts with my mom. She’s a superwoman, there’s no denying that. And one of the reasons I look up to her so much is that she’s always taken a totally balanced approach to life and mom-ing:

• She packed us the most delicious homemade lunches for school, but also let us buy the “hot lunch” from the cafeteria on Italian Dunker Day. (Remember those? They were literally just bread sticks that you dip in marinara sauce, likely served with a side of chocolate milk. Mmmm, nutritious).
  
  

• She stopped buying stuff with corn syrup in it in the early 2000s (before avoiding corn syrup was cool) when one of my brother’s doctors told her to cut it out. But she didn’t freak out when we’d go to the candy store before CCD with our friends to get a large Snickers bar to get us through 1 hour of some old retired lady droning on about Jesus. (Remember CCD? Oof). 
  
  

• And most relevant to this story is that she always had holistic practitioners alongside conventional doctors for herself, me and my brothers. But to be honest, I was a pretty healthy kid, so I didn’t notice the value in this until I started having health problems in my 20s. 
  
  

So my mom is awesome. Here’s where things get interesting… 

Connecticut has been plagued by Lyme disease for as long as I could remember—Lyme is, after all, named after a CT town where it was first discovered. You how the famous comedian Ali Wong says, “​​If you don’t have HPV yet, you’re a fuckin’ loser?” Well l’d say in the state of CT, if you don’t have Lyme yet, you’re a fuckin’ loser. (Kidding. Sort of. This isn’t your usual wellness blog. Can I get censored for joking about STDs and Lyme?)

All jokes aside, I got Lyme disease at age 7 as a result of a tick bite, and it was immediately caught by my pediatrician. I remember having a crappy summer, but I did the round of antibiotics necessary to treat it and was on my merry way. 

Fast forward 15ish years to 2016, and I’m in my early 20s after graduating college and joining the real world only to start experiencing a myriad of different health symptoms that were not debilitating but very annoying… 

• Random hives, particularly on the bottom of my feet, which made walking painful
  
  
• Waking up with a super swollen lip/eye/wrist/joint (this happened once in Barcelona where I couldn’t open my eye and I had to go to the ER. Fun fact: it only cost me €100. Imagine that!)
  
  
• Super low energy
  
  
• Tension headaches
  
  
• Thyroid issues
  
  
• Weight gain
  
  

Like I said—nothing debilitating. You’ve probably experienced some of these things too… maybe you’re even dealing with them now. But what I’ve learned over the years is that while our society and healthcare system has painted these symptoms as normal, just because they are common DOES NOT make them normal.

So after this had been going on for several months, my mom insisted that she bring me to the holistic doc in our hometown, who also happens to specialize in Lyme, to get checked out and run some tests.

He gave me the full work-up, we did a bunch of bloodwork, and it was deteremined that these things (particularly the hives) were the Lyme rearing its head again. Don’t ask me to explain the medical jargon, but basically even though I treated Lyme in a timely fashion way back when, it is an autoimmune condition, so it’s basically always in my body. If my immune system takes a hit (whether I’m sick, not taking good care of myself, or there’s something in my environment that’s hard to control), I can and probably will experience symptoms. 

The doctor’s recommendation, alongside a bunch of supplements, was simple:

“Try eating 20% less meat.”

And I remember thinking: Ok, that’s easy enough.

Here’s the long story a little less long:

I cut back on meat, which had a domino effect—20% turned to 50% turned to 75% turned to cutting it out entirely for about 2 years. (Side note: I’m not an advocate for 1 specific way of eating, and I do eat meat now. More on this in another post). These small changes had big effects on my energy, which made me sleep better and have the motivation to work out more. I learned to cook (thanks to HelloFresh!), and I started tuning into what was in my food. It’s all related. 

I took the supplements for somewhere between 3 and 6 months, I don’t remember the exact timeframe. 

That September, I was in a Barcelona ER with a mysterious swollen eye. By Christmas, my symptoms were gone. 

And with that, I was motivated to keep going. My health became my priority once I realized how much control I had over it.

Since then, everytime I experience a health obstacle, I don’t focus on the quick fix or just masking the symptoms with medication. Instead, through a mix of holistic and conventional approaches along with following my own intuition, I aim to get to the root cause and solve the issues for good.

And let me tell you—truly healing is better than just slapping a bandaid on it.