Flares Can Be A Sign Of Improving Health

After two months of feeling discouraged, my hope was reignited today following a call with my dietician, Jack, who also happens to be a biochem rock star savant. If I could only work with one medical practitioner for the rest of my life, he would be my choice, hands down.

Last March, we left our home, which had mold levels at tens-to-thousands of times the habitable limit after an unsuccessful remediation, the worst offender being stachybotrys–the dreaded black mold. The treatments I had been on for ten months finally started working, as I pulled biotoxins out of my body and worked to repair damage to the heart and brain.

By November and December of 2022, I felt energized and I felt like myself. I was reading, writing, and even hiking! My hopes soared to the heavens and I was fully convinced I had healed my body from the inside out.

At the turn of the new year, things began trending downward. I was tired, sore, and irritable. When I sat down to write, my mind was blank. I picked my brain trying to identify what had changed. Did that that sprinkle of parmesan break the spell? Or is it because I bumped up my adrenal supplement? I worked backwards and replicated the habits of those great months, but nothing changed.

So, I called Jack.

I rattled off my recent symptoms. It’s 90° and I’m freezing. I wake up restless, with dry mouth and liver pain and can’t fall back asleep; my bed-mate reports nighttime muscles spasms. I develop full-body skin rashes when exposed to heat or following contact with an even mildly-abrasive surface.

Without missing a beat, Jack had an answer. The symptoms are due to adrenaline dominance. My body is in flight-or-flight mode and, while sleeping, my blood sugar drops prompting my liver to pump out glucose and wake me up.

But I don’t feel stressed, so what’s going on? Even when we don’t feel mentally stressed, our bodies can still experience physiological stress.

When I first started working with Jack in 2018, several years before we would discover mold, he looked at my labs and suspected there was an environmental toxin wreaking havoc on my body. I removed my birth control device, which it turned out I was allergic to. We threw out our candles and household cleaners, replacing them with vinegar and baking soda. We didn’t realize the true culprit was hiding behind the spotless drywall.

During our second consult back in 2018, after I’d adopted a low-glycemic diet and started several target supplements, he suggested that there are two stages of detoxification. The first step involves pulling toxins out of the tissues, and the second step involves eliminating those toxins from the body. The different bodily systems and detoxification stages must work in tandem, or you’ll have harmful toxins circulating through your bloodstream indefinitely.

Just as he explained then, he suggested that in recent months my body recognized that it had the energy and resources to reengage the detoxification process. By peeling back the next layer, toxins that had been sequestered in the tissues of my body were drawn out to be out-processed. The toxins trigger an inflammatory cascade and, like a rock thrown into a lake, the effects sometimes continue rippling out after the offender has been disposed of.

My new baseline of “feeling poorly” is higher than it was during my last flare, which seems to support the theory of physiologically addressing detoxification one step at a time, as the body acquires the strength and resources to handle the issues at hand. Which is to say, my recently flare is a sign of my progressively improving health. I hope to remember this during future flares: we’ve got to rest before we can partake in the heavy lifting.

I went on to list out some recent labs, which Jack had recommended, and my PCP rolled his eyes over. Sex hormone-binding globulin is astronomically high, which further supports toxicity–specifically endotoxins. T3 is too low. Estrone is too high. Progesterone is extremely low. The labs are mostly “normal” according to standard ranges, but according to Jack I’m clearly estrogen dominant. Biotoxins can act as xenohormones, mimicking estrogen in the body. My hormones are still a trainwreck. They will be our next target once we pull out all the mold.

I’m now equipped with a plan to support my body’s detoxification and get me over this hump and, perhaps more important, I have hope. This isn’t a road barrier, but instead a slight incline that I can handle if I just take it in stride.