I grew up in a rural town during a time when the standard response to any ailment was, "if ya ain't got a fever and it ain't bleedin' or broke, you need to quit your griping and get moving." So for someone like me—a person who had suffered her entire childhood from chronic joint, tendon and skin pain—it would never have occurred to me to mention this pain to my family. What's worse, the pain--what I now know was chronic inflammation--wasn't caused by something obvious such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus (diseases that often present with swelling, redness or rashes, all of which would have been definitive signs that would have told my parents and teachers that I needed to see a doctor). And quite honestly, even if I had seen a doctor in those early years, Western medicine wouldn’t have been able to help me. Because what was hurting me--food--was essentially hurting everyone. We just couldn't see it because it presents differently in everyone. So I continued eating what most kids were eating--sugar-filled cereals, soft drinks, and cheap, processed carb-filled products found in most houses of low or mid-level incomes.
However, what I was eating wasn't my only problem. My health took yet another downward turn when my life began to pivot more around what I wasn't eating, or rather, that I wasn't eating. Most of my childhood consisted of days filled with school bully insults and assaults, and as a result, I was a very unhappy, terrified, and anxiety-filled child. (Stress also causes massive inflammation but that is another post for another time.) By the time I was in third grade, my nerves had caused me to vomit most every morning before school, and so began my natural leaning toward skipping breakfast and lunch...a habit that soon spiraled into a serious eating disorder. (My weight, I would later learn in therapy, was the only thing I could control in my unhappy little life.) Fast forward to my teen years and the meal skipping had morphed into a multitude of dysfunction consisting of full blown anorexia (not eating), bulimia (vomiting when I did eat), and orthorexia (over-exercising even though I had zero energy). I was also taking water pills and laxatives. Of course, all of this working out and starving myself meant I stayed a constant 100-105 lbs. That meant boys were noticing me because...what an awesome bod, right? (I gag, pardon the pun, to think of it now.) And no one I lived with noticed my obsessive behaviors (I guess everyone was busy?), so no one knew that I was destroying my body from the inside out. Even me. All I knew is that I wanted to look just so… because if I could look just so, that meant I had control of something and I could be happy, right?
Unfortunately, those daily, aggressive 3-hour workouts while starving myself were taking a massive toll on my body. The inflammation was out of control. By the age of 17, the pain in my knees and thighs was starting to interfere with my obsession to sculpt my body into a human twig, which meant I could no longer ignore it. I decided to see a professional. Enter the first medical specialist I would see in a long line of specialists over the next 30 years. A few x-rays later, this joint specialist told me I had "sloppy knees" (what a rheumatologist 30 years later would tell me is actually Runner's Knee) and that if I didn’t stop weight lifting, jogging and playing tennis, I would need knee surgery by the time I was 21. Despite his suggestion, I was so terribly unhealthy emotionally that I continued this abuse on my body for more years to come.
Since then, I think I've led a fairly average American life. Marriage. Diets. Child. Diets. Divorce. Diets. Jobs. Diets. College. Diets. Second marriage. Diets. House payments. Diets. College. Diets. Second divorce. Diets. More jobs. Diets. You get the picture. Like so many others, I've spent much of my life focused on food and looking just so, and during all of it, the pain in my body worsened to the point of complete dysfunction. When I was 47-years-old, the doctors flat out told me they didn't know how to help me. My rheumatologist was giving me repeated injections for the rampant tendonitis and bursitis throughout my body. Injections that didn't help. Neither did taking massive doses of ibuprofen or several other drugs they prescribed. My war against the inflammation was at an impasse and I was desperate. The chronic plantar fasciitis that took 6-months shifts from left foot to right had all but crippled me. I walked with a constant limp, in constant pain, and I was considering a cane. But a cane would kill my--what felt like--90-year-old hips. I had to ice everything in the morning and in the evening just to keep working. And oh, how I dreaded those first steps when getting out of bed or after sitting for long periods of time (I have a desk job so this was an ongoing odyssey of torture). I had also developed weird skin bumps on my shoulders that my husband said looked like cancer. I was getting painful abscesses under my arms that were causing horrible fevers. I had chronic stomach pain, and despite the antacids, the stomach acid was eroding my esophagus. And the only person I could blame? Myself. I was certain that all the pain I was experiencing was damage from all those workouts and lack-of-food diets I had endured. This was my fault, or so I thought.
So there I was in October 2016--what would turn out to be the most important and painful month toward my transformation to good health. I had just been given my walking papers from a job I hated, and on that same day, I received my final divorce decree from my failed second marriage in an email. What was worse though (and it's probably difficult to imagine worse because that's a real craptacular day on the scale of crappy days) was the amount of physical pain I was experiencing. Nothing could trump that. Although now I was completely on my own and I could no longer fathom how I would go on. I needed to get a new job and a new apartment, but how could I do any of that when I could barely move? A person can’t get on disability assistance because of tendonitis and bursitis. I imagined myself becoming a homeless person. I imagined needing a wheelchair and unable to afford it. Because that’s what happens when your body ages. It breaks down even more. It gets worse. You have more pain. I couldn't imagine more pain without needing a wheelchair. Everything hurt and I wasn't even 50 yet.
But all in God's timing, right?
Because it was exactly at that time when a co-worker--a nutrition researcher--handed me my first book on diet and inflammation. I had nothing else going on, and seriously nothing to lose, so I read it that weekend. And then I found similar books and read those, too. I decided to make a change. And that’s where this story of healing begins. It’s my hope if you’re reading this, if you or someone you know is barely managing rampant inflammation like I was experiencing in 2016, that this blog can help you start your journey to a new life without inflammation and without pain. We'll begin with the next post.