My Doctor Ordered Labs and Found...

...Gratitude!

…Gratitude!

It’s been a hot minute since I wrote about my health issues. In short, my health has vastly improved since I was properly diagnosed with Lyme about six years ago.

For those who’ve newly subscribed, I’ll give you a quick summary of my somewhat winding, twisting, up and downing health trajectory. I’ve actually never been “well” until now. I wrote about my freaky bout with PANDAS as a kid a few weeks ago. But even subtracting PANDAS from the equation, I was a sickly little girl with all kinds of weird aches and pains. I lived out in the middle of rural Michigan from the age of five to thirteen or fourteen on the beautiful and peaceful campus of a Christian ministry called Freedom Farm. I adored that place and miss it still. Me and all the rest of the little kids that lived there played outside from sunup to sundown like a bunch of hoodlums, skinning our knees, wading mud puddles, climbing hay bails and riding our bikes, madcap, over bumpy gravel roads. It was marvelous. Nevertheless, the ticks were atrocious. It was not uncommon to find several crawling around on my person after a day of making forts in the tall grass or climbing trees. I got regularly grossed out after a long night’s sleep to discover upon waking that a tick had embedded its nasty self near my hairline or dug in behind my ear. I’d just pick them out with a shudder and smash them or wash them down the drain.

Lyme was not on our radar, however. This was the 90s and Lyme wasn’t really on anyone’s radar. Doctors sort of knew about acute Lyme, to look for a bullseye rash, and to prescribe a quick round of doxycycline to eradicate it. In fact, when I was an older child, one of our neighbors came down with Lyme.

“What’s that?” I asked my dad when he told me about it.

“It’s an infection you get from ticks sometimes.”

I immediately thought of all the tick bites I’d had and heaved a big sigh of relief.

“Boy, I’m glad I don’t have that!”

Then I commenced rubbing my hip which hurt for no reason or my mysteriously spazzing arm. Then I’d go to bed only to wake up in the middle of the night, my entire leg afire with a burning pain from my hip to my toes. The only thing that relieved it was to get into a hot, hot bath and wait there for it to subside, nodding with fatigue, wishing for my bed. Poor little me. Didn’t have a clue. Our neighbor recovered quickly with antibiotics. He likely caught it early enough for the antibiotics to do their work.

At any rate, I was oppressed with all manner of weird aches, pains, mental symptoms, brain fog and fatigue from childhood, and it only seemed to accelerate and get much worse as I hit my twenties. The constant emotional upset I experienced for the four years I spent questioning my faith which I wrote about last week, added more symptoms like IBS and really bad musculoskeletal pain of all sorts. Mid-twenties, insomnia hit and then a weird flaky rash that covered my arms and legs and itched like blazes.

By the time I met Jonathon, I was teetering on the brink of physical collapse. But I still didn’t recognize what was happening. When you don’t know what normal feels like, you just sort of get accustomed to feeling terrible and learn to cope with it. It’s your normal after all.

I have jokingly told Jonathon that he should have asked to look at my teeth before he proposed, so he knew what he was getting into. In all seriousness, I did tell him that I felt bad an awful lot, and he certainly saw how bad I felt while we were dating. But he still wanted me, for some reason. So, we got married.

About a year and a half in, my body threw its last and final temper tantrum. My digestive issues got remarkably worse, I was constantly getting respiratory infections, and I got an awful UTI which…just never went away. Sure, I stopped testing positive for a UTI, but the symptoms of UTI remained. I was now stuck with a mysterious and very difficult to treat condition called interstitial cystitis. I was about at the end of my rope emotionally with all of this, so my husband took over and made me go to a doctor.

Yes, I’d been to doctors before in my single years, which is why I didn’t want to go to any more. They’d run tests, scratch their heads and tell me I was healthy or refer me to some specialist whom I didn’t have the money to pay for. The more preventative, natural kind would throw a bunch of herbals and other costly supplements at me and I would feel no different but a good deal poorer.

But Jonathon was insistent. He asked the Lord to show us what kind of doctor we should see. I mumbled along in rather hopeless and half-hearted agreement. Shortly after that, we discovered the doctor I’ve been seeing for the last six years. Her name is Dr. Eboni Cornish and you can find out more about her here.

She knew what tests to order and exactly what to look for. I had Lyme, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, mycoplasma pneumonia, mast cell activation syndrome, POTS, sky high histamine levels, a half a dozen food sensitivities, a chronic UTI of both E. coli and strep, crazy high levels of antibodies to candida in my bloodstream, mold toxicity due to toxic mold in our house, my thyroid was absolutely tanking, and my cortisol levels were through the roof.

And that’s what I’ve been working on since then—treating all those things and recovering and healing.

Thank God for my husband who dragged me to the doctor, kicking and screaming, and coached and encouraged me through my doubts that this doctor would be any different than any of the others I’d seen. I am so much better. So much better, in fact, that the doctor has just said I can soon reduce our appointments to twice a year instead of every four months! My bloodwork is pristine. Metabolic panel, perfect. Thyroid, perfect. My gut feels great (unless I’ve overindulged in oxalates.) Same with my bladder. I don’t get flares anymore unless I’ve eaten too many oxalates. My Lyme symptoms are no more. I’ve weaned completely off the compounded, heavy duty anti-histamine I had to be on for years. No more candida issues. I can eat dairy and eggs again. Gluten’s still a no go, but gluten free is easy, so who cares? My life-long battle with anxiety has become 98% easier. I can recognize that obsessive compulsive loop and turn it off that much faster now, and I generally just feel well emotionally. And though I am currently coming down with a respiratory virus…it’s been a whole year and a half since I’ve succumbed to one and I’ve been exposed countless times without succumbing over the last year. I used to get sick at least six or seven times a year. This means my immune system is roaring back to life and healthy function.

But there remained one more sticking point.

The last appointment I had with my doctor before today’s, we discussed the results of a cortisol saliva test I did around Christmas time where I had to spit into these little tiny vials at prescribed times throughout the day, then label and freeze the stupid things, then send them to the lab for analysis. (Lots of fun, let me tell you.) Getting my cortisol levels to a normal, healthy level have been difficult. We did a lot of things to improve that, and they did bring it down some. But the saliva test showed that my cortisol levels were still too high, especially in the morning. Lower than ever before, but still too high for comfort.

“It’s high,” Dr. Cornish told me, “but not the kind of high that can be fixed with medical interventions.”

Essentially, it was now a me problem. I needed to chill out. Now, this stung a tad because compared to old me, I was so chill, I was practically comatose. We talked about various strategies to help me do this. Getting to bed earlier, working on winding down before bed, the “Calm” app, etc…

After my appointment concluded, I got to thinking about things, and this is how it went:

“My levels are too high in the mornings. I don’t feel particularly stressed in the mornings, but I definitely do at night when fatigue hits and I’m feeling anxious about everything coming at me the next day or feeling annoyed with all the things I didn’t get done today. In fact, I often feel super emotional right before going to sleep. So, I could do the “Calm” app then. But I hate apps. And besides, God is my refuge and strength and maybe I should start acting like it right before bed instead of wallowing in despair just because I’m tired.”

So, instead of trying the guided “chill out” app, I decided to conduct an experiment. I knew we were going to retest my cortisol levels before the next appointment, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to put my old standby, gratitude, to the test.

I write about gratitude all the time. I’m sure you’ve noticed. Gratitude has pulled me out of many a slough of despond. It’s pulled me out of anxious spirals and helped me get through night terrors as a child.

But gratitude isn’t just a nice thing to do for self-help, it’s actually a command.

“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus, concerning you.” (I Thessalonians 5:18).

And if I think deeply about this command, it can bring me to tears, for it is a love line direct from God. This is what people who think that the God of the Bible is the ultimate cosmic killjoy in the sky who stands over us with a sledge hammer if we mess up…don’t understand. He commands us because He loves us. He created us and He knows what makes us thrive and He knows what hurts us. He commands us to do the things that bring life, and He commands us to abstain from things that bring death and destruction. Giving thanks brings life in more ways than the way I’m about to demonstrate, and obeying this command, though a discipline, is not a miserable chore but a joy.

So, I made a plan. From the day I discussed this with my doctor until the next doctor’s appointment I would make one small change in my night time routine. I was going to get in bed, turn off the lights, and before closing my eyes to sleep, think back through my day and find five lovely things that happened. Then I was going to thank God for them and go to sleep. And that’s what I did from January until last week when I went to get blood drawn.

I woke up with a start the morning of my blood draw at 5:30 from a legit nightmare. I fell back to sleep for my remaining time on the alarm clock, but didn’t feel very refreshed when it did go off. I got myself ready to go feeling cranky and stressed about some stupid thing. (Oh, I know what it was. I’d weighed myself after waking and was up a pound.) Then I got mad at myself for being cranky and stressed. Then Jonathon said I needed to stop obsessing about the scale and I got irritated with him for that. (He was, as usual, right about that too, and I apologized for being a crank later on.) I scolded myself the whole way to the lab.

“You’re getting bloodwork drawn to test cortisol, the stress hormone, because you’ve been too stressed out, and now you’re getting stressed out on your way to check your progress on not stressing out! You’re going to mess up your bloodwork!”

I was fasting and feeling kind of extra tired at the lab, a little worried I’d get lightheaded and woozy during the draw. But I didn’t faint and was on my way in no time. A little bit later, the lab called and told me I had to come back because they forgot to draw another vial. Bah! So I went back and got poked in the other arm. I left with gauze and medical tape affixed to both elbow crooks, for all the world a short, brunette, disgruntled pin cushion.

“Come here, you drug addict,” Jonathon joked as we left.

I scowled, but couldn’t help the corners of my mouth turning up just a tad.

“Well, that was a wash,” I shrugged, assuming the results would not be stellar.

Reader, I got the results back Monday and I was overcome with astonishment. Today, my doctor confirmed that my joy was warranted. My cortisol wasn’t even one point over normal. At 8:30 in the morning when my blood was drawn after fasting and being cranky and worried…my cortisol was in perfectly normal range.

And the only thing I did differently was to thank God for five things right before I fell asleep most every night for about two months.

Gratitude is powerful. And it’s powerful because it aligns with reality. And the reality is that God is the source from which all blessings flow, and it is right and proper and healthy to make note of them and thank Him for pouring them out on our often ungrateful heads by the bucketful.

Today, I am so grateful for the blessing of good health. I am now officially healthier than I have ever been in my entire life. I’m thankful for a husband who worked hard when I couldn’t and spent thousands of dollars getting me just the right kind of care I’ve needed all my life and couldn’t access. I’m thankful for his encouragement and his firm belief that I could and would get better when I didn’t have the strength to believe it myself. I’m thankful for his insistence that I just stay the course even when I couldn’t see the progress I was making through the fog of illness. I’m thankful to God for giving me this husband who probably saved me from an early grave and/or a life of disability. And I’m thankful for doctors like Dr. Eboni Cornish who won’t quit until they find what works for each of their patients. May doctors like this multiply, for they are the kinds of doctors we desperately need.

Two things before I conclude. 1. If you are ill and it all seems a mystery, know that you can get well. If given what it needs, your body can and will heal. God designed it to do so. 2. Thank God for everything and anything you can think of. It’s right and it’s proper, and it may even improve your health.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

P.S. If you enjoy reading the things I write, please consider supporting me financially by becoming a paid subscriber. This will give you access to my audio book, The Pursuit of Elizabeth Millhouse, here on Substack, and the opportunity to read a pre-published copy of my brand new novel, 27. You can read the first chapter of 27 here for free!