I first started noticing symptoms of chronic illness in 2003 when I was a student at Princeton University playing soccer on the varsity women’s soccer team.
I noticed some GI distress, frequent infections, pain in my body, some rashes, and insomnia and brain fog. I had a major crash after the 2007 Boston Marathon and I started seeing doctors and I had symptoms and I was given the label of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. By 2017, I was diagnosed with SIRS. At that point I had 72 symptoms accumulated, uh, many debilitating ones. My worst days, I mean I was just too, too weak to lift my head off the pillow. I was just writhing in just unbearable pain and nausea and I just I had a hard time just mentally processing simple questions to respond when things were really bad.I told my mom that I just if this was going to be my life I didn’t want to live anymore. And I mean at that point I had detached myself from my children because I just couldn’t take care of myself. So I was a shell of a mom and my kids were shuffled from home to home just because of me. And then in late 2017 our life just became too much and my husband decided to leave me…he wanted to separate. And I admit that I was, I was not an easy sick person to be around. I was angry at the world, at the medical world, I was angry at myself. So I didn’t know how I became such a sick person and why I couldn’t get myself better.
And it just seemed so unfair. I mean I started with Western medicine and any medication I tried either didn’t work or made me feel worse. I went to alternative medicine. I eventually got to functional medicine. I tried every diet and lifestyle change possible. I saw temporary changes with a few of the protocols and that I tried but they were fleeting and the benefits disappeared very quickly. Eventually, I started working with some mold specialists and at that point is when I moved out of my house. I started the Shoemaker protocol and I saw some improvements from that. I really did, but I just started to yo-yo because my environmental sensitivities grew as time went on.
I went out to the desert and lived outside trying to heal in pristine air to detoxify. I was told I just needed to detoxify that I had a genetic mutation and I had the genetic testing done to show that I had the dreaded mold gene and my body doesn’t detoxify properly.I did improve the first time I was in the desert for three months, but I tried to move indoors again and that’s when severe MCS and mast cell activation started. And I was actually forced homeless at that point. Homeless–outside and as it was getting colder in Canada, I had to make the decision to leave for the desert.
To leave my children and this time I didn’t know when I was going to come back or if I would come back. So I spent that winter, it was the winter of 2018 in five different states in the US deserts. I was first started out in the desert wilderness on a cot because I my MCS was too severe at that point to handle, to tolerate a tent or a rental car any that I tried. So I was living outside and I was chasing tolerable weather conditions and also air that I could heal in and just survive in. And at this point my reactions became more severe. Look at my face. I don’t look it. I would have called 911 unless I if I had cell service but I didn’t so. It took a lot of binders though and that finally helped. Oh man. I’ve been in so much pain.
I became more limited in where I could go to maintain functionality and I knew how far I could drop if I didn’t maintain functionality and I wouldn’t be able to care for myself and I was alone in the desert.Hey, just a quick update. Um, I am alive and this is my face right now. It’s starting to heal but my skin texture …it’s like I have glue dried on my skin. Like I can’t move my this whole region very well. It’s like I got burned from the inside out. I was desperate because I desperately wanted to get back to being a mom. I first learned about DNRS from an environmental illness doctor in 2018.
I was skeptical. I thought it meant that my illness was psychosomatic and I was offended. So later when I was homeless in the desert I had made a phone friend um a homeless man with the same illness and we talked on the phone a lot and we talked about different biohacks, we talked about brain retraining a fair amount and it kept coming up. We’re trying to figure out whether or not it was legit at all. And at the same time he actually introduced me to the Lord and we started reading the Bible together.
And as I was reading the gospels I just felt like God was saying to me if you believe that you can move your mountain without any doubt you truly can. And I just had this heart change and I started to believe that I could heal through brain retraining. So I started the DVD program and within a month I actually started to see some good improvements.So I could go into the town that I was living outside for longer without any severe reactions and I started to be able to go into more buildings without having to decontaminate.All right, here I am in a movie theater for the first time in a very long time. It’s a matinee of course, but I’m excited that I got to go into a movie theater. And I actually was able to go and see a movie for the first time in a very long time. So those are some really big wins for me. I was down to eating I don’t mean say five or six foods that I knew were safe low histamine foods. Very quickly I had doubled my foods. My mom at this point had come out to help me through some of my stuff and I just knew that my extreme avoidance journey was over. I was done with the isolation. And I needed to hug my kids and I needed to tell them that I loved them. So I just took a leap of faith and I went home. And at first I lived in my mom’s sunroom which is closed off from the house in a mask mostly in isolation and when I came in the house I was in my respirator and with time through my training I was able to spend more time with my kids, more time in the house without a respirator and I started to be able to go anywhere. At this point almost any stress became a trigger for me like any form of stress became a trigger and I just knew that I at this point I didn’t know the program well enough. I didn’t think that I was implementing it well enough to really get further. So that’s when I decided that I really need to go to the in-person program to get better teaching and also to find just community support from others who were going through this because while I was home I just felt still so isolated and alone. The instructors, they just spoke right to my heart and they helped me humble myself to see this new again for the first time as this kindergartner. I realized I just had not given this program the credit for how deep it is, how far it goes. We got vulnerable with each other pretty quickly. So it laid a foundation for some great friendships to emerge.
We’ve supported one another after the programand over the months as I was rewiring retraining my brain I couldn’t talk to anyone else in my life about what I was going through. I had two really good friends that I could talk to and knew.
And so, yeah they became my lifeline during my brain retraining process. Thanks to DNRS I’m now limitless. I am symptom-free from over 80 symptoms. I live an unrestricted life. I even have a resilient immune system. My kids can come home sick and cough all over me and I don’t get sick. I can now go out to a restaurant and order right off the menu, order gluten, eat a sandwich. I can run six miles and not crash from exertion. It’s pouring rain. And I just ran six miles. Loved it. This past winter I was able to go to my friends’ 40th birthday party and stay out late and dance past midnight.
One of the biggest moments for me has been becoming a dependable mom. I got to take my daughter to her first day at school. I truly believe that those of us who have suffered so much in this life who have been just so utterly broken are poised for so much greatness on the other side of illness .I like to speak the following quote over myself to remind me that my suffering has been worth it. “Life tried to crush her, but only succeeded in creating a diamond.” -John Mark Green. I pray, I do . I pray that you choose to try DNRS so that you can be here one day declaring your victory about your own journey.
