About a year ago, my daughter was graduating, and I was about to become an empty nester. As we all know that is a hard time for all parents when the youngest leaves the nest. I was looking forward to spending more time on business and with my fiance’ at the time, James.
James is a liver transplant, 6 years in. He was doing very well in working on weaning off most of his meds.
The thing with that, is it’s a multifaceted issue and you have to work with your doctor when you are a transplant.
Disclaimer: if you are a transplant recipient, you MUST work with your doctor with any changes.
In June of last year, we went to Chicago and had a full plan to celebrate my birthday. What we didn’t plan was for James to reunite with his family, whom he had not seen for 20+ years!
I won’t go into alot of detail but the stress alone of that encounter was enough to put anyone’s liver enzymes into overload!
That opportunity to reconnect with his mother was good and bad at the same time.
James had some not so great conversations and the stress was far more than either one of us bargained.
That visit lead to another emergency, drop your hat and run, visit to Chicago again a few months later when his sister called frantic asking for us to come because his mother was passing away. We literally dropped everything, I shoved my cat and all his belongings and all my plants into the car and took them to my daughter’s house for an undetermined stay while we were in Chicago to say goodbye to his mom and console his sister.
What happened next was not short of a disaster.
James and I threw all the food we could in the coolers and packed the car to the gills to drive 12 hours from Denver to Chicago. James drove straight through, no sleep for almost 2 days. I was already stressed and James was having fits of itching. I had a hunch it was a gut imbalance from the immune suppressants he was on.
Our stress was on overdrive, little sleep and an unknown time frame for returning home.
The night after a harsh argument with his family, his itching went out of control. He couldn’t take it anymore and he rushed to the hospital for help. I knew he had a blockage of some sort in his bile duct, but the doctors did a textbook diagnosis without looking more closely into the issue.
James, being a transplant, he told them EVERYTHING about the natural things we were doing, and hoped it would give them insight, but the moment they found out I was a natural health coach, they immediately blamed his itching on me and said it was a “textbook” case of rejection.
He ended up in the hospital for 10 days, me with no place to stay, living on salad and oatmeal and the last of kefir I had made from scratch.
They drowned him in antibodies, T-cell destructive drugs and prednisone black which is 500 mg of prednisone in one sitting for 3 days.
He could hardly remember what I said from one hour to the next.
After the whole ordeal was done, the itching has still not resolved! But his liver enzymes were de-escalating(artificially).
The team of doctors gathered around us and told me literally, if I ever give him so much as green tea, they would kick him out of the transplant program.
SERIOUSLY!
I thought I had almost killed my husband to be. I felt like a little girl in an alley beat up by a gang and left for the wolves. I hated myself for months, and even made a verbal promise never to touch natural medicine again.
I though I was finished…
It was a case of mis-information, and I was the most logical scape goat to blame.
As time went on, I started feeling God’s tug at my heart, and decided it was time to get some counseling to work through some trauma from that encounter.
I turned to a Functional Doctor for some deep dive blood tests and help. I had diverticulitis.
The stress and self loathing had caused severe leaky gut and I became food sensitive to everything I was eating: avocados, bananas, goat milk and kefir, whey, sweet potatoes, romaine, oats, peas, einkorn, and the list goes on.
But how could that be, I don’t eat any processed food, no gluten, sugar, gmo or commercial, no seed oils, EVER!? The answer: stress.
High stress causes a massive production of a stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol stops digestive enzymes, making a manageable issue worse. It was the straw that broke the camels back. And as the good bacteria died from the imbalance, the food in my intestines that should have been broken down to nutrients for transport to my organs for use, were still in food form and leaked through the holes in my gut into my blood stream.
How did I have holes?
When your digestion is off, ususally from stress, liver damage which causes a low bile flow and gall stones, or a missing gallbladder from removal surgery, the stomach is not able to make certain enzymes for digestion to keep the friendly bugs(probiotics) alive in your gut. Those friendly bugs create a protective slime for the gut lining and help digest food completely, transforming them into nutrients for the body to use.
So essentially, it missed a step, because the probiotics were dying off during the high stress. The food leaked(hence the term leaky gut) into my blood stream in their food form and not nutrient form and the body didn’t recognize them, launched an all out immune attack on the invaders and filed away a memory in my DNA blueprint that it was a virus that needs to be destroyed.
What you don’t know will hurt you.
Not knowing why I had cramps all the time, and severe constipation, I lived through it, until I couldn’t.
When I continually ate the foods my body saw as offenders, even though they were healthy (kefir, Ezekiel bread, goat cheese, grass fed goat whey protein powder, sweet potatoes, romaine, pea shoots and sprouts, bananas, avocados) my body recognized them as the enemy and kept attacking them. Then, after a while, I ended up with diverticula swelling and becoming inflamed, causing diverticulitis.
It wasn’t until I found out what food sensitivities I had that I could take the RIGHT action to help my body heal.
The Disappearing Sludge
After James and I got back, life calmed down and he had changed his diet for the better, got help from an integrative doctor and the wheat zoomed food sensitivities test, his body began to calm down too.
Every time he ate something, his immune response would cause inflammation in his digestive track, which included his liver.
The stone (or sludge, they called it) that I suspected was blocking the bile ducts and causing damage, was finally resolved and after a tone of medications that damaged his body. But it wasn’t the drugs that fixed it. The drugs caused DILI (drug induced liver injury).
With the right balance and patience and the integrative doctors help, James’ liver began to heal.
They scheduled an procedure to go in and remove the “sludge” as they called it, from the bile ducts. Guess what they found?
No blockage (we had resolved that), no damaged bile ducts (their original diagnosis of PBC (primary biliary cirrhosis) and no visible signs of liver damage.
OK, so they diagnosed him with liver rejection with a biopsy that showed damage, but the surgeon went in and saw none?
HUH?
Right! You get my point. They slapped a typical text book diagnosis on someone they were not sure was really going through rejection.
They called him a “unicorn”.
When they didn’t know, is that my husband was following a healthy path, God’s plan for wellness and his body did the rest. The Dan Shen, which has been proven to repair liver damage, helped repair the damage he had.
It’s not the only thing that helped, but it was a factor.
While he was in the hospital, I sat down the his head doctor of the liver team and had a heart to heart.
He wanted to put James on sirolimus, as an off chance it would help stop the high enzymes (with the theory of his T-cells where attacking the liver)
I knew he would loose his life if they did because of the side effects of sirolimus causing death to liver transplants. Both James and I pushed back and trusted God, because we know He had another way.
I will never forget what one of his liver team said to me before we left the hospital the last time he was admitted. She sat me down and said I had missed my calling as a doctor and asked why I am not one. I simply said to her: If I wasn’t 50 years old and medical college wasn’t so expensive, I would.
A Renewed Sense of Purpose
After that talk, I realized I was right all along, but was bullied by a few young doctors that are taught that natural is deadly.
If natural modulated for the specific need of the individual, was used for transplants in coordination (integrative medicine) there would be a greater success in avoiding rejection. But it has to be done right, with patience and wisdom.
This experience, has given me wisdom and a new purpose to help others realize that God’s Way and help the body heal itself.
This is NOT my way, it’s God’s way.
Thus Healing God’s Way is born.
Healing God’s Way
Is a 7 part program that teaches God’s plan for our health, our life and wellbeing. It’s all written in His Word.
This is the foundation for my new coaching program and a 7 part course that is being developed as we speak.
I have put together a Resource Guide for you that helps you understand how to manage medication side effects and avoid devastating complications.
If you are struggling with symptoms that are not being resolved, or new symptoms are popping up while on medication, we should talk!
How Do You Avoid Annoying
side effects of Medication, or worse…
Devastating Medical Complications?
