I try not to reminisce too much about my 5 year battle with Lyme, Lupus and other autoimmune disease that cut my professional track career short. It’s not that it’s a sore subject, I just have moved on emotionally and mentally. And while, I’m 100% healed with no symptoms whatsoever, the experience definitely shaped me as a person and no doubt, influenced my decision to be in CPG and making personal care products that I believe can help heal people from a truly toxic world.
I then went through multiple doctors, each giving me opinions that I didn’t agree with. One was so bold to tell me that you “couldn’t get Lyme disease in South Carolina”…..even though deer and other woodland creatures are carriers (and I was bitten by the tick that gave me Lyme in North Carolina). The experience was enough for me to one day write a 365 page medical non-fiction book about what I did to get well. I wrote over 500 pages within two weeks. The editing part, took almost a year.In 2005, I went from racing the 800m at the US Track and Field Championship, trying to earn that spot on the World Champ team. Two weeks later, I was in my parent’s guest room, back in South Carolina, sick and unable to care for myself.
The love of all things science related and having a REALLY open mind, is how I cured myself. I did lots of “wacky” experiments on myself and they worked! It was a last resort, as I was getting more sick with the “treatment” on antibiotics. I was in pure desperation and until you’ve experience it yourself, it’s REALLY hard to describe and put into actual words, what kind of struggle it truly is and the kind of mentality you have to have, to get well. Your emotional wellness suffers so much when you are sick, it can prevent you from getting well. Being an athlete and knowing how to really WORK HARD, get TOUGH and make it through, is one of the only reasons I can think of, as to how I made it out (…and that I can absorb a lot of medical data and process it really well.)
In South Carolina, in certain parts, there is hardly a “health store” within a 2 hr drive of most places. We had a tiny little natural, food CO-OP store about 30 minutes down the road and another “country” store owned by Mennonites that sold raw dairy and some other very helpful food staples. In SC, the make it easy to buy raw milk.I drank it for 5 years there and I believe it was one of the more instrumental things I did to get well (as far as daily habits). When you’re sick, you have a tendency to muscle waste and it can be problematic when you are 5’ 9” and weigh 109 lbs. Raw dairy has plenty of very helpful enzymes, fats and solid nutrition.
It was instrumental looking back, because not only did it give me access to food and supplements (and education) that I used to heal up, but lead me to see people out of mainstream medicine that were HUGELY helpful in my recovery.Our CO-OP store was small, but it had everything you really needed. The biggest help was that of the small health food stores I would visit when I went to see alternative health care providers dotted along country roads through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the upper part of South Carolina. I remember the owners being very well educated on supplements, food and even being a great resource about “healer” types in the area I should go see.
One person that I went to see taught me about the dangers of getting my wisdom teeth cut out and what I had to do to fix it. I learned about biological dentistry and if it wasn’t for biological dentistry, I would of never healed. My wisdom teeth being removed WAS the single biggest health problem, I ever had. The bone inside my head was rotting from routine wisdom teeth extraction.