Alex: Before I got sick, I did a lot of physical activity, almost whatever I could. I got bored sitting at home pretty easily. My favorite sport was either soccer or basketball. Um, but I also loved free diving and boogie boarding and snorkeling. Uh, I loved being at the beach. I just have countless memories of beach bonfires and always being down there. Uh, there was a pool we had that was kind of our little special place that we went with our family friends to have dinner, either pizza or chicken nuggets or something. So, those are some of my primary memories.
Mom: So Alex was a super energetic, extroverted, happy child. He was always on the go. He loved to play sports, he loved his friends, he loved life. And he was very sensitive to other people’s emotions. He was an empath. He cared about people. He cared about his friends and his family.
He was in first or second grade when I started to see signs of what I felt like was too much fatigue around seasons. When in the fall seasons I started to see a pattern of fatigue and stomach aches and his skin color would look poor, he was pale, and he’d have kind of bruised eyes.
I had a history of chronic fatigue and spent a few years really struggling with my health. And so I started to draw those parallels but then also tried to distance myself from that. I didn’t want to know that that was a potential to pass on to my child.
Alex: I started not feeling well. It’s all kind of mashed together. Um, but I remember vividly in pretty sure it was fourth grade when it was when my teacher started to get concerned with how many times I was going to the office for being sick or kind of missing a bit of class.
Mom: We started with acupuncture. We found success with NET. We did some chiropractic. We went the alternative route at first. It was recommended to get allergy shots when he was in starting fifth grade to help with the allergy symptoms. And that was our final straw. He started, he responded, in almost a catatonic state I described one evening after allergy shots where we ended up at the emergency room.
Alex: My body reacted extremely poorly to those. And there was one night where I was just eating some Cheerios because I didn’t feel well, having some cereal, and then I all of a sudden just started feeling awful. And I went to the couch and just it was a combination of a very negative reaction to the shots and just a probably one of my worst, if not my worst anxiety attack I had through my I was almost kind of like I wasn’t really interpreting or comprehending anything.
Mom: This was actually a frame grab from a video I took in desperation because he started violently retching for hours at a time, days on end, and just in almost a convulsive state. And our pediatrician was not able to do anything. I had to ask to be referred to a gastroenterologist that took probably six weeks. Um, and when I mean he wasn’t eating. He was a kid and I remember thinking as an adult, I remember that feeling of how it felt to be turned away by the medical community. But I never thought it would happen.
Alex: For me, the reason it was so hard as a kid, when you’re younger you kind of expect doctors to know everything. Like it’s like the doctor is the savior and how a day like an adult they keep the doctor away, but you still got to go to the doctor to make sure everything’s okay. And when I really started to realize that the doctors just didn’t know what was wrong with me, that’s when I started to get scared as a little kid.
Mom: To start getting referred to specialists and we went to gastroenterologists. We got the diagnosis of celiac disease but going gluten-free didn’t resolve his problems. We went to Stanford for many months. We went to Mayo Clinic for two weeks. We went to Chicago to see a doctor in Chicago. We went to the University of Chicago. So we spent about a year doing the hospitals. And I just added up this number. I didn’t want to do it, but I did. I’d say we’ve safely spent, I’m saying we spent about $150,000 over the three years.
Alex: It was kind of obviously meant that the doctors like it wasn’t we after all the specialists we saw, none of them really gave help. Some of them were even, I feel like, a negative effect on me, they’re saying, oh, he’s just gonna have to cope with this. It’s probably gonna get worse or are you sure you’re not making it up because I’m a little kid? It almost felt like they turned their back on me.
Mom: Nothing really shifted. He would feel a little bit better and then it all started back up. And so every single treatment we would do, we might see a little bit of shift and then it ended. It was incredibly frustrating and the part where it really became quite frightening was doing the balance between taking a child of that age to hospitals and doctor’s office nonstop. It became his life. Um, how much more do we subject him to these tests? So doing that balance of accepting a new normal, you know, and also continued to pursue what was wrong. And you know, when we hit that point where Alex was, we were afraid for his life. He became a shell of himself and very quiet and very little emotion, you know, the anger and the fear. He slowly started to confide that he didn’t want to live anymore. That he didn’t see how this was a life, he didn’t see a way out and he felt he was a burden on his family.
I first heard about the Dynamic Neural Retraining System from our chronic fatigue doctor, Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum. And he had treated me successfully and I was about 90% better and he recommended that I take the program to finish off and get 100% better. And I looked at it and I thought it looked great and I was planning on going and then my son got sick… and Dr. Teitelbaum also treated him and recommended the program for him. So we we got the DVDs in November of 2016 and spent Thanksgiving break doing, we took about 10 days to do the DVD program together.
Alex: The DVDs did really inspire me while I was watching, but it wasn’t that long before like almost later in the day I’d kind of completely given back up on it again. And after the DVDs, which was the first thing I was exposed to, I did practices pretty religiously for about I’d say two, three weeks, but then I just started I saw some results, but I just kind of it was still my cognitive wasn’t back, so I kind of just gave up on them and said I was doing them just to make my parents happy. And it wasn’t until my mom about a month and a half later after watching the DVDs went up to the seminar. So I came back from the seminar in Ohio and sat down with Alex and you know, told him about the people I saw there that this was the real deal that Alex’s experiences were not unique. He wasn’t special…or there’s a lot of special people out there. And to be perfectly honest that a lot of people were much sicker than he was and had been sicker longer…and to see what was happening and what was shifting. Over those few days in this group and in myself and in my sense of beliefs and how that would relate to Alex and you know, how intertwined our neurology was. That was incredible. That’s what really said, all right, I have to do this. Just I can’t pretend to do this and make people happy forever. If I want it to last, I actually have to recover for myself and for my friends and family. So I would definitely say the hardest part’s gonna be the practices, but you will see results eventually, even if they’re little bits at a time. It’s what’s different about the results from the practice is they very rarely go away, whereas when I was going with the doctors, they would do something, it would help maybe for a couple weeks, maybe if I was lucky like two months, and then it would go right back. And that didn’t happen to me with my practices. I saw results that wouldn’t be have to deal something I had to deal with as much anymore, so I could focus on other things. So that would be my uh biggest thing. And then hiring a coach was extremely helpful, especially since my coach all the coaches have pretty much been through some sort of thing where they can relate to you, they can give you advice, and it was it was incredible. So I was always practicing. I would practice right when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I’d do. Maybe I would get out of bed um, just so I wouldn’t fall back asleep and get some water, then I’d go back and for like an hour, I would just practice. And then whenever I tried something new, like because one of the first things I learned through the Dynamic Neural Retraining System was I can push myself and just because I’m feeling symptoms, it doesn’t mean I’m destroying my body. So I very quickly started exercising again and being physical and that really motivated me to keep doing my practices because to keep myself from getting symptoms after I would have to practice and that was the big kind of up up and away moment where I felt hope.
Mom: The thing that blew me out of the water that just I could not believe it was when he started experimenting with gluten cross contamination and he was able to go in to people’s kitchens and have no reaction. Fortunately, he just stuck to it. He really really stuck to it and we saw the results fast enough. initial results fast enough, but again, I want to emphasize that he was very symptomatic for a long time and worked through that and and and did the hard work. And the peeling the onion, this was our coach gave us, gave me this analogy and really for me stuck with me. I know there’s a lot of talk about, you know, the ebbs and flows and the steps forwards and the step back. And our coach really encouraged us to look at it as like peeling the onion and it just made so much more more sense, you know. He would you know, these top layers would fall off um really quickly and then we’d hit a lower layer and maybe a thick layer and a hard one and they would come back because we were dealing with another layer, another trigger, another and so it became less of a step forwards and step back and more about just these things were falling away and we had to come back and hit some of these really hard things.
Alex: My sensitivity to mold was one of the first things that really did decrease. Um, showers just warm showers weren’t enough to treat me. I was still slightly sensitive to cold water, but that was something that really uh came back quickly that I was able to do. Um, my sensitivity to cross contamination and gluten and other food allergies did recover fairly fairly quickly. And um what the only things that really took a long time to recover were the chronic nausea and brain fog. First the summer, you know, for us when everything just really came together was summer and there was this just this frantic like go out and live life. And we just plowed it was breathless. I mean, we just went and had a fantastic summer.
Mom: And then the summer ended and it was time for school and he had to start school and that took some adjusting. And now it’s stuff that I used to dream of.
Alex: I ended up actually finishing my first school semester with like a 4.0. I thought I was good enough. I was aiming for like maybe like a three. So I’ve been thinking a lot about jobs and colleges and I got my first job and I’m starting to train for that, so I’m excited to really be more independent and being able to not have to have other people support me.
Mom: And then, you know, the next big hit was like when he started football practice, you know, three four three or four hours a day. I sat through. He wore me down. There’s no way. And interestingly, not typical, my husband was so disappointed. He was like, I can’t believe you caved. And I’m like, if you’re gonna be the one who’s gonna you can try. I sat through that first practice, you know, in the middle of the summer, watching him do wind sprints, running and just had no idea if he was gonna be able to hold up to it. And it was; he just did it. He just did it. And I’m getting to, you know, have freedom in my life and so is my husband and we’re relaxed about things and you know, when somebody has a bad day, it’s just there’s no more living in fear.And the person who gets missed from the story a lot is his younger sister. Alex and his younger sister Lucia are incredibly close, and she suffered greatly through all this because she saw it all. And she’s also witnessed the recovery. And she’s just spent a lot of times when he was sick talking about the good old days when we got to do this and that and um, it’s been just a pleasure to watch her be able to be a little girl again and life is normal for her. And there’s just no more living in fear. And there’s just a tremendous amount of gratitude for just the normalcy of life.
Dynamic Neural Retraining System. Retrain Your Brain, Transform Your Health, Reclaim Your Life.
