a bit of background …
Everything I have ever learnt pertaining to health has been out of necessity …
Discovering what it takes to be healthy became a journey that started out of necessity when I was just 21 years old, living on my own, and only a few months into my first year of university. It was at that time that I began to experience some troubling symptoms, including incomprehensible fatigue bordering on chronic exhaustion, foggy thinking, overwhelming anxiety and pain syndromes.
Event #1: During this first year at university, unbeknownst to me, I had developed the clinical presentations of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Within this umbrella classification, I was dealing with Leaky Gut Syndrome, Leaky Blood Brain Barrier, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), sensitivity to ochratoxin (black mould/mycotoxin) and Candida Albicans, as well as sensitivities and intolerances to many common foods. I endured symptoms daily, ranging from extreme fatigue, pain in my limbs, foggy thinking and confusion, crippling anxiety, painful bloating, and generally feeling poisoned 24/7.
I found that my immune system was triggered daily, or even by the hour, due to a very low threshold to the tolerance of most common foods as well as the cocktail of toxins, solvents, resins, heavy metals in acrylic and oil paints (cadmium and lead, etc.), ever present within the university workshops and studio spaces. My immune system was both over-reacting and under-functioning whilst my detoxification organs and drainage systems (liver, gallbladder, kidneys, large intestine, lungs and skin) were clearly congested and overwhelmed.
That was nearly 30 years ago, when mystery illnesses were not taken seriously, mainly due to the lack of interest and funding from a pharmacological perspective. This lack of pharmacological interest in funding clinical research and sufficiently large peer-reviewed studies of “complex health presentations” is due to the absence of monetary “return and gains/profit”. It simply doesn’t make sense that Big Pharma would seek to invest in studying pathologies that don’t require a drug to be prescribed for control of symptoms.
The net result was that crucial clinical research was (and still is) not conducted by Big Pharma, so valuable data did not exist or emerge for a decade after my first health crash. Furthermore, initiatives with any sincere aim to truly understand the complex nature of CFS, ME and MCS, as well as other seemingly evasive complex mystery conditions, had to be funded privately. Meaning that it wasn’t until privately funded initiatives such as the Optimum Health Clinic (OHC) – a private health clinic co-founded by Nikki Gratrix and Alex Howard in 2005, specialising in treating CFS/ME from a nutritional and psychological perspective, that robust clinical research began to emerge. The OHC worked with patients from 35 countries, earning over 10,000 followers online. This enabled them to draw upon a vast data source for a comprehensive research study on the nutritional and psychological aspects of treatments for CFS and ME at their clinic. This significant research study was published in the widely-read British Medical Journal Open, providing robust data to draw upon and learn from whilst putting CFS and ME on the clinical map. But this clinically significant research didn’t even begin until a whole decade had passed after my first energy crash in 1996.
In the eyes of General Practice, mainstream medicine, my illness simply didn’t exist as a medical syndrome, because it had not been mapped by the medical model. Instead, my GP recognised my symptoms as nothing more than Yuppy Flu, recommending that I take a medication called Prozac! At the time, I was very young and, just like most other patients, ignorant. Yet, I knew for a fact there was more to my range of symptoms than Yuppy Flu, and so I ignored this advice and sought holistic private help instead, which I had to pay for with my student loan.
I stumbled across sources of information that truly changed my way of thinking about illness and subsequently the outcome of my trajectory in health and life. I sought nutritional advice and worked closely with a Systematic Kinesiologist. This process sparked (by necessity) an insatiable interest in holistic health modalities, including Nutritional Therapy (and later nutritional biochemistry and genomics), Reiki, naturopathic cleansing techniques, and more. It took 7 months to get me out of bed and back into the workshops so that I could complete my BA (Hons) Degree course, and then another 7 years to regain complete control of my symptoms. However, my health story and health crisis did not end there…
Event #2: I went on to have three children, all within the space of 4.5 short years. Despite many years of fatigue, I was committed to breastfeeding, wearing each of my babies in a sling and co-sleeping with each of my babies for the first year, too. So, rightly or wrongly, I found myself either pregnant, breastfeeding (or both) and sleeping with my babies continually for 6.5 years, which no doubt took a toll on my body biochemistry and nutrient resources.
My son was an early walker (5.5 months), but a very late talker. He displayed strong social engagement and emotional intelligence from the age of 12 months, but did not talk until he was 4 years old. At around this age, he began squinting, grimacing and banging his little head against the wall. Was he autistic? I would wonder.
I began to research to help me understand what may be triggering his symptoms and causing this distressing behaviour. He was already wheat-free, sugar-free, yeast-free and had not received any of his childhood immunisations other than Polio. The Polio vaccine was administered privately and without Thimerosal/mercury, so his symptoms were unlikely to be due to vaccine damage either. I discovered that heavy metal deposition could be the root cause. After receiving guidance from a respected technical director at a UK supplement company, we took immediate action and administered an oral chelating agent. Within two days, both of my son’s eyes blistered up (presumably) as the toxins were released, given that the eyes are the orifice that reflects the Liver. The scabs and blisters lasted around six weeks, but he never squinted or banged his head against a wall again.
Event #3: The next event was around the time that I stopped breastfeeding my third and youngest child, my (eldest) son was then six and a half years old. We were at a community garden party event where my son was chased and bitten by a large dog. The dog was on medication at the time and should not have been at the garden party with children, and certainly not off the lead. The hospital advised an emergency Tetanus vaccine, given that my son had not received Tetanus vaccines before that time. Rightly or wrongly, we went ahead and agreed that my son should receive the emergency Tetanus vaccine.
My son’s borderline asperger tendencies escalated overnight directly after he received that emergency Tetanus vaccine resulting from the dog bite. My son’s primary school teacher and Head picked up on rapid changes in his character, presenting like late-onset autism. His school arranged to have him assessed for autism, and once the results came through, they apologised for having missed the diagnosis of autism before that time!
I was already a trained Nutritional Therapist and had attended some of Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride’s lectures, read her books and studied her work, so I knew for a fact that autism doesn’t have to be a fixed diagnosis. Instead, it is a pathophysiological presentation resulting from a confluence of factors on sliding scales. With this in mind, I refused to believe that my son’s presentation was fixed and so devoured every research paper I could find, applying nutrient and dietary protocols and programmes that made sense to me. Six months later, after I supported my son with leading-edge glandular therapy from Leo Galland M.D. (The Four Pillars of Healing) and Nicholas Gonzalez’s research alongside Barbara Wren’s (Cellular Awakening) naturopathic practices and Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride’s programme (Gut and Psychology Syndrome – The GAPS diet) for restoration of the gut microbiome, my son’s school ‘Head’ apologised to me in person for having made a mistake in their assessor’s diagnosis for my son’s autism – that no longer existed! Not only that – he had also somehow miraculously jumped a whole reading year!
Event #4: Then came the necessity to find answers to and resolution to if possible the elusive familial health presentation that involves the dysregulation of the nervous system.
In 2011, one week before my son’s eighth birthday, my son had a serious accident that shocked our family to the core. He had jumped off the garden trampoline onto his little hands, snapping the ulnar and radius bones in his left arm clean in two. With his left hand then far too close to his left elbow, my son was writhing and screaming in agony for close to an hour because the ambulance took so long to arrive (it was a bank holiday!). Once on the scene, the paramedics had no choice but to adjust his arm back into shape without a painkiller – there was simply no time left to wait for the painkiller to kick in, to avoid losing his arm.
Shortly after that day, I began to develop fasciculations – a worm-like feeling crawling underneath my skin, on my legs and arms, and then one evening a large chunk of molar tooth at the back of my mouth crumbled and fell away overnight. When I went for dental restoration, I was administered a double dose of adrenaline to numb my mouth for the length of time required for the dental work. Later that day, when I was attending my children’s Christmas church service, my left arm became very constricted and felt numb with gripping pains shooting up my arm into my chest. Was I having a heart attack? Very quickly, and by the following day, I was experiencing thousands upon thousands of fasciculations: worm-like movements under the skin and deeper within my nervous system, upon every inch of my body. You could visibly see the more peripheral movements, what looked like ripples, worm-like movements under the skin. But I could feel thousands upon thousands more than I could see. Up and down my spine, my eyelids, my tongue, my toes, my fingers, my brain. This continued throughout my body, relentlessly night and day, peaking for the next 2.5 years, but continued as a constant ebb and flow of intensity for the next 10 years.
Due to family and life dynamics, I found myself emotionally marooned and fundamentally alone, left to figure out what was happening to me. My GP was very caring and did everything in her power to figure out what was happening to me, but she seemed more confused than I was. I was referred to a neurologist to have an MRI and electrophoresis. I completed comprehensive bloodwork through my GP, insisting on including additional markers to examine lead reference ranges in my blood.
Bingo! All of my bloodwork looked OK through a GP-lens except for lead, which was high even by their reference range! I went on to complete some privately funded Functional Labwork to take a closer look at my heavy metal loading, involving a 6-hour DMSA urine challenge test. Meaning that analytes were taken and examined from samples of urine that had been collected over a 6-hour period, after DMSA (chelator) administration. The results from this comprehensive and detailed test reflected that my lead scores were indeed OFF the charts-HIGH within my cellular tissues.
Given that lead drops out of the blood and into cellular tissue to protect the brain within 24 hours, this was a clue indicating that I was being actively poisoned! I had consistently filtered all of my drinking and cooking water (by that time) for 16 years. Furthermore, we had two water filters plumbed into the main water pipes within our home; one huge filter for whole-house filtration, plus a second (double-filtration system) and a separate tap for drinking water. Could I (we) STILL be consuming lead via our mains water?! Regardless, the levels of lead present within a blood draw were proof that I was being actively poisoned, which most likely meant that my children were too.
Lead displaces calcium in both the bone and the nervous system. Could lead be responsible for blocking calcium from being correctly placed within the dendritic receptors of my nervous system, disrupting electrical current at the point of synapse, translating into fasciculation movements? Could lead be being dumped into my teeth, diametrically opposing calcium, therefore pushing calcium out of my tooth – hence why it crumbled? Could lead even be partly responsible for my son’s finite tipping point into late-onset autism, once he had received an emergency tetanus vaccine. A vaccine that had the potential to create systemic inflammation in his body and brain, as well as the potential to create a significant degree of intestinal and blood-brain-barrier permeability, facilitating toxins such as “lead” to translocate from the blood and circulatory fluids and into the brain.
MY STORY IN WDDTY & LABWORK
I had these questions, and more. And with my inquiring mind, I have spent many years trying to figure out the exact tipping point to this intensely all-consuming neurological condition. I considered that Benign Fasciculation Syndrome had been triggered by the injection of adrenaline alone, but once I knew that lead was in my blood, I already knew enough toxicology to know that if not the sole cause, it would at the very least be a contributory factor.
The other contributory factor was likely Limbic System Impairment, which first appeared as C.F.S. in my early 20s, resulting from immune system impairment due to multiple food sensitivities and sensitivity to environmental toxins. With further L.S. impairment layered on by life events Event #2 & Event #3
To this day unless I take 100% complete care of my self; nourish myself daily, love myself daily, honour my circadian rhythms daily, then symptoms of my underlying imbalances can and do still creep back in. And sometimes take great hold over my life once again.
I lived through what I could only describe as “next level fatigue” with accompanying symptoms to include breathlessness, tinnitus, repeated ear infections almost every three months that led to near deafness for many months at a time, nerve pinching, neuropathy, numbness and shooting pains down the left arm and left leg. It also included an inability to walk for more than a few paces on some days, a lack of focus, an inability to complete tasks, and more disturbingly thousands of uncontrollable movements under my skin throughout my nervous system that felt like thousands upon thousands of termites crawling everywhere, to include my spine, eyelids, tongue, and every square inch of my body. My chronic health condition was not helped by the fact that my children were ages 4, 6 and 8 years old, I was a full-time mum, and I was expected to work to contribute 50% of all of the household and child-rearing costs.
To remediate my health, I applied all of my academic and intuitive learned skills to include bespoke Nutritional Therapy, Naturopathic detoxification practices, Systematic Kinesiology to dowse for what I required (at times, every day), F.I.R. sauna therapy, glandular therapy, lipid replacement therapy, somatic therapy, PEMF mat therapy, ASYRA Biofeedback and so on.
Event #5: Six years after the first day of my first experiences with the relentless symptoms of this complex mystery health condition, my eldest daughter (and middle child) presented with very similar symptoms. Her symptoms included involuntary limb movements (shoulders, fingers, toes and more). She was just 12 years old, in a new school, and completely isolated with her unusual symptoms that had hit her hard out of the blue.
Due to the barbaric nature of electrophoresis, I swore never to subject any of my children to the same barbaric approach of investigation that included being strapped in a chair to have 6-inch needles inserted into every muscle throughout my body, to assess electric currents, over a period of 60 minutes. Unsurprisingly, this experience put my nervous system under a great deal of stress, which in turn ramped my symptoms up, sustaining heightened fasciculation for some time afterwards.
I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands, which also meant pulling myself together and coming up with another, more holistic plan for her recovery. I applied many of the same tools that had worked for me over time to include: bespoke Nutritional Therapy, Naturopathic detoxification practices, Systematic Kinesiology to dowse for what she required once a week, F.I.R. sauna therapy, glandular therapy, lipid replacement therapy, somatic therapy, PEMF mat therapy, ASYRA Biofeedback and so on. She also required additional tools and processes to help her fall asleep each night.
On the face of things, I have come to find sub-clinical diagnoses that describe facets of our health conditions, including Dystonia and Benign Fasciculation Syndrome. However, mechanistically speaking, I have good reason to believe there is a disruption of, or an autoimmune connection, with the Voltage Gated Calcium Channels (VGCC) described within a L.E.M.S. Diagnosis. This mysterious health presentation started when I was just 36 years old, when my children were ages 4, 6 and 8 years old, affecting all of us to one degree or another through the passage of time, with my eldest daughter and me the most.
Thirteen years later and a few months away from my 50th birthday, my children are now 17, 19, and 21 years old, with two having moved on to university and one completing her A-Levels. We have all come a very long way with all of our health challenges, thanks to the bespoke level of Nutritional dietary therapy, naturopathic cleansing practices and targeted nutrient therapy care administered and organised by me.
Setting the stage:
Please note that my children were raised on a sugar-free and wheat-free organic diet from birth. They lived in an environment free from harmful EMFs (which affect the Voltage Gated Calcium Channels), without television, phones, or tablets, and with Ethernet-wired PCs in the home. We turned the internet hub off at night every night. Furthermore, I had adopted these dietary and lifestyle principles – alcohol-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, ate organic food, filtered all of my cooking & drinking water for 9 years prior to the birth of my first-born. I swam for 3 hours a week, ran twice a week, and practised yoga and Transcendental Meditation daily since I was 4 years old.
Event #6: At a time when my children and I had only just begun to enjoy some semblance of normality and restored health, COVID-19 happened. On the heels of COVID-19 came Transfection & Spikophathy ~ resulting in too many rounds of Long-COVID post viral fatigue, suspected KPU, horrendous hormonal disruption and much, much more … When you are ready, please do click through the link below to find out more.
