Sunday, July 6, 2014

Some of the [@!#%&] I did to my body that brought on this awful disease...

When I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis, I was very confused why me--a pretty healthy gal who didn't even drink soda pop--would get sick from this awful disease.

I ate sweets in moderation.

         I went out to eat but 2 or 3 times a month.

                                                    I made most dinners at home.

                                                                                 I exercised & even completed 3 triathlons.

My doctors and I really thought I WAS a picture of health.


But I wasn't, and I didn't even know that I was @!#%&-ing my body up. I've thought about what brought me to the place of IC long and hard. I put together  a list of things that I did that brought this autoimmune disease on. It took me 4 years to put this list together. But I write to you today having had 60 days with ZERO interstitial cystitis pain and flares. If I have experienced any discomfort, it has been minimal at best. Dare I say it has been what a person with a normal bladder feels? I don't know. I can't remember. But I have felt pretty damn good. 

Shiz I Did To My Body to Bring On IC: 

1a. Vaccines. Sorry to go there right away, but chronologically, it was one of the first things I did to my body that stressed it out. I know, I know. Vaccines do prevent diseases, and I hate hearing stories about people who became sick from serious diseases that are known as 'preventable' due to vaccines. I get it. Vaccines help with stuff. But it doesn't change the fact that my immune system is screwed up, and that vaccines tinker with that same immune system. Perhaps this overloaded my system and made it so that my body couldn't tolerate the rest of the crap I did to my body later on in life (see #2-#8 for further details). In the future, when I have more babies (yes, I still hope to have more!), I will do homeopathic prophylaxis to them. It has the same idea as vaccinating, but without using tracable disease tissue that has been incubated in monkey liver or aborted fetal tissue, and without the heavy  metals and toxins as preservatives. The second someone mentions not-vaccinating, everybody gets emotional and angry. "Herd immunity and making others sick" are words that are being thrown around. Again, I get it. I know why people get emotional and angry. But guess what? IC makes me emotional and angry too. So now, I seek out non-toxic solutions to problems (like vaccinations) in order to preserve my long-term health. Don't trade in short term health for long term health problems, like I did. It seems that the deeper I dig, the non-toxic solutions always have 2 key elements: a) they don't cost a lot of money--and they don't MAKE organizations like BigPharma money, and b) they are non-toxic and safe to me. It's a win-win in my book.

1b. Messing around with my hormones. Just as it is not good to screw around with the immune system, one should not mess around with the endocrine system.  Eating a lot of modern soy (which is in virtually all oils and processed foods), and taking stuff like birth control is a bad idea. I did both! Bah! 

2. GMO's & Pesticides. Holy cow, these suckers are bad. And in the USA it is in everything. How do I know this? Because here, CORN=GMO's. The corn in the States are subsidized by the government making it cheaper to grow. So corn starch and high fructose corn syrup are used in literally every non-organic product sold here. And now, virtually all of the corn made here is of the Monsanto GMO variety (Monsanto is the chemical company-turned-seed-company that makes GMO seeds). Did you know that your gut has assigned specific gut bacteria to 'manage' toxins found in nature? For example, I've discussed how the Oxalabacter Formegenis is a gut bacteria that is specifically created to eat a natural toxin God put in our food, Oxalates {yes, the stuff of which most kidney stones are made---if you're getting these stones, you probably don't have the Oxabact Formeg. bacteria...you've probably killed it off with antibiotics. Join the club of chronic health issues...}. But what about man-made toxins like pesticides and GMO's? God didn't make a gut bacteria that can digest Monsanto's GMO's. So, that wrecked toxic havoc on my body. And that just added to the toxic pie.

3. Sugar. Lots of it. So I ate sweets every week. I don't fear sugar today, but in the way I was eating it before, sugar was toxic. Hold on. I wasn't some crazy candy-bar-eating woman. Before IC, I didn't pig-out on sugar, but I wouldn't hesitate to suck on a Starburst or gobble up a large slice of cheese cake if I ever came across one. Then, when you consider the amount of grains I was eating---which is basically like sugar because it is a carbohydrate and carbohydrates are a hop-and-a-skip away from becoming sugar--I was stressing my system with sugar. This can cause systemic candida. Whether or not your doctor can officially diagnose this in you matters not. If you're on the Standard American Diet, you probably have candida overgrowth. I had lots of yeast infections. Sugar feeds stuff {yeast, et. al.} that weakens your gut flora.  And my gut was not happy. Boo to bad gut. Today, sugar in 'moderation' means that I rarely eat it. No candy and cake. When Laura Ingalls Wilder of the Little House on the Prairie books would suck-and-save a little peppermint stick candy for a month, I realized that I was having too much sugar. Just because sugar today is cheap and easily accessible, it doesn't mean that my wonderful and beautiful body was meant to eat so much of it every day. So today we add a bit of raw honey to stuff. But not much. And I'm happy with that. I don't even crave sugar any more. Go me!


4. Drugs. Drugs. And Antibiotics. If I had a headache, I would NOT take aspirin/Tylenol/etc. I wasn't really a 'pill popper'...BUT I would take Benadryl for any seasonal allergies. And if I had a bladder infection, you bet that I would go to the doctor and get my antibiotics. I should have tried treating it naturally. There are so many cures for bladder infections which are NOT antibiotic related. Google Apple Cider Vinegar and Bladder infections. It seems to work like a charm for people. Then there is the Uva Ursi (herbal) cure. Or a whole host of other things. Unfortunately, by the time I had had so many rounds of antibiotics for those repeated bladder infections (which lead to IC), my body no longer had the immune ability to fight it off via natural remedies. My body was so screwed up that apple cider vinegar wouldn't touch me. Homeopathy IS powerful enough to turn things around, which is why I'm so glad to have this powerful healer in my life, but until homeopathy, I was too far gone for the more conventional natural cures for my bladder infections. Same thing for the seasonal allergies. I should have sought out an alternative to treat the seasonal allergies. But I didn't. There are natural cures, but I never even tried to seek these out. 




5. Not getting my bladder infections CONFIRMED before taking the antibiotics. That was REALLY stupid. Why was I damaging my gut for things that weren't even really bladder infections!? But then I shouldn't have been going to antibiotics in the first place. Refer to #4 above.




6. Not sleeping. I guess this one was partially my fault and partially the fault of little children who have a special knack for waking up at night. But really, why did I stay up until 3 am ALL OF THE TIME doing little crafty projects? Go to bed, girl. Sleep heals. Now I guard my bedtime with a vengeance. And my healthy happy husband is the 'night time' man :)...he gets up and deals with the kiddies. Go hubbie.


7a. Allergy shots. This relates to #1 and #4 above. But I was stupid. I didn't want to take drugs every day for my seasonal allergies, so I thought that a 'natural' route would be to get low-doses of allergens injected into my body once a week. I even did this stupid 'rush treatment' that basically lasted 8 hours of getting injections every 15 minutes. The prep-work for the 'rush treatment' involved lots of antihistamines and steroidal anti histamines. THAT RIGHT THERE should have tipped me off that this was not a good alternative to treating my seasonal allergies. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I can't believe I did this. Dumb girl. I really think this was the trigger that set off my IC. Alas, if I only knew. If I only listened to that little voice in my head that said 'don't do this...it's a little cray-cray'...but dumb me didn't listen to that voice. Smart little voice.

7b. **UPDATE***I forgot to mention this one... Not listening to my body! I really was a pretty darn healthy girl all through high school. Running cross country, eating homemade school lunches (you'd never catch me eating a basket of fries for lunch), and not limiting my food but eating enough was something I always enjoyed. But suddenly things started to slip just a bit. I started to notice the following in my early twenties:
     a) A plantar wart on the bottom of my foot that would NOT go away,
     b) A sudden onset of seasonal allergies, which worsened each year,
     c) A sudden intolerance to dairy products and chocolate
If I had been drinking the amazing and healthful raw milk (I choose A2 milk which is often Goats milk as it is easily digestible), I probably would never have dealt with the milk intolerance, and perhaps it would have kept the other 2 things at bay, for raw milk has a recorded history of minimizing seasonal allergies, asthma, and it has a recorded history of boosting your immunity. But I digress. Notice how all 3 issues above involves the immune system and gut: My body couldn't see and heal the plantar wart, my immune system was suddenly not managing histamines like before, and my food intolerance is a direct link to my immune system attacking milk proteins. Each of these indicate a weak gut flora. And guess what? Your immune system IS YOUR GUT. If I had dealt with these littler things via natural medicine...to UPROOT AND HEAL and not suppress and ignore (as my allopathic doctors had helped me do),  I know I would not have developed my genetically predisposed autoimmune disease, IC. I wonder what your genetically predisposed to developing if you keep ignoring your body? We all have sleeping giants in our genes, people...you just don't want to wake it up and find out what yours is.

8. Gluten. Gluten is a toxic protein naturally found in nature that is really really crappy for your body. It literally causes leaky gut. Our ancestors rarely had gluten in their diet. They would make real wheat bread but it would be basically gluten free. Don't believe me? Well, let me just prove it to you then:
        a) Original wheat, before it had been hybridized in the 1940's, had a naturally low gluten count in each wheat berry. But they hybridized the wheat to make the wheat stalks shorter and easier to harvest by machine. When they hybridized the wheat, the gluten content went UP. Way UP.
        b) They would sprout their wheat back in the day. Before 1940's, when wheat became a highly industrialized process, farmers would allow their wheat to sprout in the fields. This took time, but they had the time because harvesting by hand took...time! Did you know that sprouted wheat breaks down the gluten so it is no longer there? Sprouted wheat = pretty much no gluten. Cool, right?
        c) They would soak and dehydrate their grains. I'm cheating here because this technically doesn't relate to GLUTEN per-se, but when you soak and dehydrate grains, you remove the phytic acid, an anti nutrient which literally flushes your vitamins out of your body when you digest the wheat. Not good. 
        d) Then, when they would make their bread, they wouldn't use that grainy store bought yeast that one uses when they make "homemade bread"...instead they'd use naturally fermented yeast. This yeast makes home made bread grow a lot slower...it takes about 24 hours for a loaf to rise properly. But this natural yeast (also known as sourdough yeast) is also really good at breaking down....[drum roll please] the gluten! Cool beans...I mean cool yeast, right?!

In short, gluten is a bad toxin that causes leaky gut and literally opens the door to autoimmune diseases. Gluten = bad. But someday you bet that I will be eating the wheat bread described in A-D above. Can't wait to blog about that someday!

9. Having a closer connection to God. This may be your 'higher power' or whatever it is that you feel most comfortable with. For me, my faith involves a real, loving, living God who knows me. I know, this one may seem a little out there to many of my readers. I will open up more about my spirituality in another post, but let me say this: If I had more carefully maintained a stronger relationship with God--as I had enjoyed in the past--I think I would have been more 'in-tune' and better able to HEAR that little voice in my head. **Sigh. ** But I guess I wasn't all that far away. Because when the doctors offered me crazy bladder interventions like Botox and AntiDepressants, that little voice wasn't so little any more, and it screamed. "DON'T FREAKING DO IT!"  I am sooooooo glad I listened.

One second. Before I finish this blog post I need to run and pee...I'll tell you how it went...

(wait)

I'm back. That was awesome. I voided a few cups of liquid and I feel pretty darn good (I let my bladder get pretty full because I was writing this post. You're welcome.) I'm picky and want to get even healthier, so I still have a little ways to go, but I'm getting there.

My menstrual cycle is coming up soon, and that is typically when things go a little awry, but I recently started a new homeopathic remedy--yes in addition to the other stuff--(it's Sepia 6C mixed together with Conium 3C...it is a Banerji Protocol for hormonal issues). It should hopefully help balance out my hormones more, particularly my adrenal glands.

But don't forget, I did say that I had 60 days pain free. That means that I had one menstural cycle there in the middle that was amazing and I had absolutely no pain! It's a huge step forward, and I'm fully hopeful to be 100% in remission one year from now. That is when I will try to introduce my bread (see #8 above). 

Eat real food. Food heals. I hope my thoughts are helping you. Please post and say hello. A quick hi makes me feel like I'm helping someone out there and that my blog posts aren't a waste of time.

Hugs and health friends,

Paola