When I was 12 years old, I had no idea that I was a ticking time bomb. A poor diet & sedentary lifestyle had me weighing in at over 200 pounds. An abusive, high-stress household was flooding my tissues with trauma and frying my central nervous system. Then puberty arrived to pull the pin on the grenade that was my body.

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It all started innocuously enough with sharp pain in my right wrist. I couldn't bend it, but there was no swelling, and x-rays revealed no structural problems. But the pain only intensified and spread to other joints. Other symptoms showed up, and within a few months, my body turned into a prison.

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All the joint pain made it difficult to walk, and painful to sit or stand for long stretches. I was super tender from head to toe, to the point that a grocery bag knocking into my leg was agony. I couldn't get a decent night's sleep and woke up every morning more tired than when I went to bed. My brain was  so foggy that I had trouble keeping up in school. And that might've been the biggest blow for a kid whose identity & self-worth was based on her grades.

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The following year, after very little testing and no treatment, a rheumatologist diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. She prescribed a low dose antidepressant to "regulate my sleep cycles" (whatever that meant) and 30 minutes of exercise per day. Beyond that, she said there was nothing to do but live with it.

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Neither of us knew it, but that conversation set the path for the rest of my life.

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Even at 13, I just knew there had to be something I could do to help myself. So I refused to accept the doctor's grim prognosis and embarked on a journey that has made me the Wellness Coach that I am today.

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I overhauled my diet and dropped a lot of weight. I found a corrective chiropractor who discovered that my spinal cord was backwards (yes, backwards). Three times a week for a year I sat in a chair with a sandbag strapped to my head, adjusting my spine millimeter by grueling millimeter. I endured intensive physical therapy for bulging discs, bursitis, atrophy, and hypermobility. I experimented with various diets & forms of exercise. 

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For several years after that, I lived a normal life and enjoyed seemingly good health. But there were always little signs & symptoms that something still wasn't right in my body.  Then in 2015, my immune & nervous systems erupted like a volcano. I couldn't work due to crippling anxiety. My gut revolted so often I could barely handle more than scrambled eggs & chicken soup. Inflammation was causing severe allergic reactions, and I had so much pressure in my head and face that I couldn't hear properly for months. Labs eventually revealed what I'd known for years. I didn't have fibromyalgia (a diagnosis/condition that I have very strong feelings about). I actually had Hashimoto's disease (autoimmune hypothyroidism) and it's much more serious cousin, lupus.

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Lupus is a scary word. But once again, I refused to accept the statistics. And after 20 years of Western doctors only making me worse, I was done listening to them. So I threw myself full force into "alternative" modalities & mind-body medicine:

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• EFT/tapping

• Somatic yoga

• Meditation

• Reiki

• Trauma work

• Affirmations with mirror work

• Acupuncture with Traditional Chinese Medicine

• Naturopathic & homeopathic medicine

• Bodywork

• Astrology

• And much more, including lots and lots of books