http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2009/december/obit-walton.html
Since I wrote Part One of this blog, many people have been asking me what my health problem was and how I treated it. To pick up where I left off, I had been diagnosed with both a cervical herniated disc and Fibromyalgia, and packed off with pain pills and a self-help pamphlet. By October of that year, I decided I had to quit my job and focus full-time on getting well. I was dopey and still in pain, and my health continued to decline. Despite all I read about Fibromyalgia, that it wasn't a deteriorating illness, I was deteriorating. I couldn't walk up a flight of steps, carry a bag of groceries, or sleep. I was taking Lyrica, the newest "miracle drug" for Fibro. After six weeks, I had gained 25 pounds. Lyrica did help with some of the pain, but with no weight plateau in sight, my doctor took me off it. The next week was like heroin withdrawal, or what I imagine that would be like. Shaking, sweating, nausea, fevers/chills. Fatigue, no appetite and weight gain.
I was at my most depressed. Something else had to be wrong with me, but the doctors told me I had my diagnosis and I should make the best of it. I learned that 70% of Fibromyalgia patients cannot carry on full-time employment. was spending three mornings a week in physical therapy with muscle manipulation, heat, and electro-stimulation therapy, and that helped level off the pain, but I wasn't getting better. As a last resort, I set up an appointment with Doctor #10, John Pittman of the NC Center for Integrated Medicine. Having grown up around so many major medical systems, I was skeptical about "Alternative Medicine", but after trying so many doctors with no results, I felt I had nothing to lose. Dr. Pittman is an MD that uses both conventional presecription medications and homeopathic medications, and lots of tests. His results are based on scientific evidence.
Dr. Pittman was different from the outset. I wrote a complete medical history, and my initial visit was 3 hours. They asked me my health history going back to my childhood. The application asked my goal.. "To get my life back", I answered. At the end of the interview, Dr. Pittman said he was pretty sure he knew what was wrong with me(!!), but of course wanted the tests back for confirmation; that my pattern was quite familiar to what he'd seen in many other patients. The tests performed were basic blood and urine tests, but he asked for more detail than previous doctors had asked for.
Two weeks later, after two years of misery, I had my answer. I had a chronic fungal infection, generally known as Candida. If you think about your middle school chemistry, disease is either bacterial, viral, fungal, or parasitic. No doctor had tested me for the last two. My fungal level was "off the charts" literally, beyond the 99th percentile. What that meant was that for years, the fungus had been growing inside my intestinal tracts so that it covered it like kudzu. Over time, nothing could get in, or get out. As a result, by the time I was diagnosed, I measured in the bottom quartile of white blood count, red blood count, and all major vitamins and minerals, and in the bottom 5% of my B vitamins and D vitamins. With a chronic fungal infection, over time in order to function, your gut gets little holes in it where the food passes through, unfiltered. This lets in many bad things, including many toxins,. So not only were my essential vitamins and minerals and blood cells depleted, I had heavy degrees of toxic metals, especially mercury. In all, 10 of the 11 toxic metals I was tested for were evident in my blood system.
In addition, I had hypothyroidism (low thyroid) and abnormally low hormonal levels. As Dr. Pittman put it, my battery had "run down". Since my diagnosis I have learned that there is a 70% co-incidence with Irritable Bowel Symptom, Candida, and Fibromyalgia. Increasingly, doctors wonder if there is a chicken/egg syndrome. Does the fungal infection at some point trigger the auto-immune disease?
Dr Pittman told me that the treatment he recommended would take about a year. Based on his other patients, he felt there was a 75% chance I would feel substantively better, and that I would learn how to avoid major setbacks. He also warned me that most of the treatments he recommended were not covered by insurance. There were very few protocols approved for either Fibromyalgia or Candida other than pain pills and anti-fungals; neither if which he believed got to the root cause of the problem. He outlined a four step plan. 1) Aggressively fight the infection; 2) Immediately address the fatigue through intravenous supplements, since I wasn't absorbing what I needed through my digestive track, 3) Rebuild my immune system and digestive track so my body could filter and absorb normally and 4) have chelation therapy to remove the toxic metals.
I was so thrilled to have an answer and a plan. I wasn't going crazy; I was just very sick! But why had it taken so long to get a diagnosis? What was wrong with the conventional medical system? I took my test results back to my internist and other conventional doctors I had seen along the way, and they validated his diagnoses, though no one could explain why they hadn't found the issues or ordered the test. The problem in my opinion, is two fold. No regular doctor can spend enough time with you to figure out what is wrong if it is not glaringly obvious and the illness is systemic. Secondly, health information was not captured and stored for all the other doctors (or me) to evaluate.
In the next blog, I will tell you how I crawled back to health.
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