My Healing Journey

After over 20 years of dealing with systemic Candida I have taken many roads in my healing journey some worked others didn’t and I have learned a lot along the way.

I have struggled with my weight and what is clear to me now was undiagnosed hypothyroidism as well as extreme muscle spasms and pain, that likely would have been diagnosed fibromyalgia.

I have always worked with alternative therapies and never had the money to to go to alternative practitioners and have found my way on my own.  Despite the the ongoing battle I have kept a positive attitude and feel that my journey to health is closely tied to my spiritual journey within.  I have had a lot of success with meditation and inner healing in working through various levels of illness.  On the other hand it is this very spiritual journey of purification that continuously brings up new levels of emotions to heal that inevitably end up stuck in my body in some way.  It’s all one and at this point it is almost impossible to separate out what gets worked through first at any given point in time, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual, only that all four need to be addressed to achieve success.

I know that my belief and inner knowing has kept me alive and kicking.  Age for example to me is just a number.  In general I don’t feel that anything is inevitable because of age and I make a conscious effort to cancel out any idea offered by the boob tube that contradicts this.  It makes me so mad when we are told over and over on TV, in the newspaper and magazines that this declines with age and that declines with age.  When I hear it or read it I say a loud and clear bullshit, & then cancel, cancel, cancel anytime I hear that crap.  As I do get older though I am finding it quite shocking to come upon other people “my age” on TV reality shows (which is 46 in Jan 2010)  Some of them look old enough to be my parents, and it is a good reminder of just how powerful our thoughts about aging are.

Last year I came down with Subacute Thyroiditis.  It really knocked me on my ass but as all things that knock us down it has been an amazing teacher to me.  It really uncovered my ongoing hypothyroidism and led me on a journey that has taught so many new things about my body and health.  It has finally begun to put together so many of the pieces of my health picture. I now am seeing the various deficiencies that led my body to have an environment that allowed the Candida to overgrow all those years ago, and why I could never really get it under control even doing all the anti-candida protocols and using all the various antifungals under the sun.  There were missing links in my body that kept my body from being able to achieve homeostasis.  The most important was iodine.  The sad part is I intuitively received the information that I needed more iodine back in 1992, but back then not much was known and the higher dose iodine I needed was not available in health food stores.  There was no internet to easily find the information that is so plentiful now.

Subacute thyroiditis can be a year to a year and a half to work through and at the beginning in meditation I was told that there was purpose in this illness and it would bring me back to balance.  It hit in February of 2009 and now almost a year later I am getting close to being on the other side of this illness with a wealth of new information that will serve me the rest of my life.  Even those of us who have always self treated and used supplements can take way too many things for granted, or be way too quick to give away our power to the latest and greatest thing in the health industry.

Something like soy would be a good example of that.  Even though I never bought into the hype that soy was the end all be all, I also had no idea it could be so detrimental and did not safe guard myself against it’s anti-thyroid effects.  There were so many things over the years and they created the perfect storm of thyroiditis.  Now as the dust clears these things seem so obvious.  We don’t have to go through years of suffering like I have, we just have to go back to very simple principals in diet and nutrition and for god’s sake not listen to our government about these things.

I have a lot of disdain for most mainstream medicine and am fully convinced that if I had spent much time with doctors over these years I would most surely be dead by now.   My mother has been a nurse for over 50 years now and she agrees.  Luckily for me she was also always a bit of a rebel and apparently it rubbed of on me early on.  When I was still a teenager the two of us were experimenting with mega dosing vitamins using the original life extension book.  She is still working as a nurse at the age of 77 and everyone thinks she is much much younger.  When they ask her how she does it she says “I stay the hell away from doctors and I don’t give a damn what my number is” LOL 

We both stay away from all the conventional advice, things like vaccines for example we feel are highly toxic and we wouldn’t touch them.  She let the hospital know she would quit before she would let them force a vaccine on her, and it is with that same intensity that I have refused to go to a doctor during this last year.  There were a few times during the year when both of us got scared and wanted to head me off to a doctor, luckily not both at the same time so one of us was always rational enough to know better.  I stuck to my guns did more and more research and all these months later I know I made the right choice. 

It’s funny how when you are sick it is so easy and desirable to give over your power.  I once had a gallbladder attack and the pain was excruciating, some of the worst pain I have ever experienced, and I have a pretty high pain tolerance.   My mother and I discussed taking me to the hospital.  At that point had I gone to the hospital and they wanted to remove my gallbladder, I would have said yes to anything to stop the pain.  I didn’t have insurance which caused me to think long and hard about the possibility since I had no way to pay for any kind of treatment, let alone surgery and got online in the midst of my pain to see what the consequences were of living without a gallbladder.   Ultimately I didn’t go and my mother being the unconventional type, thought maybe an anti-diarrheal would help stop the spasms and we could try that before resorting to the hospital.  It did stop it and  3 or 4 days of eating nothing but apples so the pectin could help dissolve any stone and my digestion could recover from the spasms, and I was back to normal with my gallbladder where it belongs, doing what it is supposed to be doing.

After almost a year participating on the iodine list on yahoo, learning, doing and healing with the iodine protocol along with what I already knew.  I decided to start to share this process here as it is clear to me how many people are suffering from the same group of issues that I have had. I am getting better and feel empowered to do so with my own choices instead of giving my power away to a medical system that I find corrupt.  Now with 20+ years of experience with candida, spiritual healing, meditation, homeopathics, essential oils, various herbs and tons of supplements of all kinds, and my new understandings gained through this thyroiditis, there are lots of things to talk about!