The symptoms continued and became more regular. Less than a year later, I woke up with the left side of my body numb and unable to see out of my left eye. I went to the emergency room. After running through some neurological tests, the doctors said, “We think you’re having a stroke” and kept me overnight to run even more tests. The entire time, I kept thinking, How did I get here? I don’t belong here, yet I am here. It became clear that the Universe always puts us where we need to be to get the lessons our soul needs most. So I surrendered. I prayed. I trusted. As it turns out, I didn’t have a stroke (thank goodness), but at that time, I was diagnosed with complex migraines, which are rare non-life-threatening migraines that have the same symptoms as a stroke.
Assuming I was out of the woods and on the road to recovery, I left with a skip in my step. But over the course of the next several months, my symptoms got even worse as my fatigue turned into days of chronic exhaustion and even more weight gain, accompanied by severe depression and sharp body aches—to the point of being bedridden with muscle pain for days at a time. I needed to know what was causing this full-on body breakdown.
Over the past several years, I had been through a host of primary care physicians, neurologists, rheumatologists, and spiritual healers with no real progress in my symptoms. Fed up with feeling dismissed by doctors only focusing on one symptom at a time and telling me it’s all in my head, or my favorite, “If you just lose weight, all the symptoms will go away,” I set to take control of my own health by taking a new approach.
