Since I was a little girl I have always tried my best to be a good person and to be kind. But I do not believe that that is enough anymore. Having been chronically sick, I have the utmost respect for those who are willing to risk their own lives for the health of humanity. They are the true healers and leaders of the world. Let me first clearly state, this is a disclaimer that what I share and give my opinions on is in in no way a replacement for medical advice. The world renowned naturopaths, homeopathic doctors, and other healers who I look to for advice on ingredients have been receiving terrible threats because their patients are healing without drugs. I am concerned that the information they have been sharing online will soon be scrubbed away. So I am going to start saving it and sharing it with all of you.
With all the information out there, it is important to have a spirit of discernment. Like our grandmothers always told us, don’t believe everything you read or hear. Do your own research. Question everything. It is not being negative, it is being smart. I spend two to three hours a day researching health and how the body works and I don’t think I will ever stop. It is my passion. Sometimes I am reading about new information and sometimes I go way back to ancient healing techniques that have been suppressed. This has been a daily meditative part of my day since I was sick. When you learn how the body works you learn to treat it with respect, to nurture and nourish it. Our body is our temple.
In my early twenties I had a serious health crisis. I had dealt with cystic acne in my teens and had been prescribed tetracycline and a few other prescription drugs to try to combat it. I do not remember anything helping much. I had always been pretty healthy but in my early twenties I started getting what seemed like the flu every week or two. I would ache all over and get a sore throat with swollen glands. After a few months I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome by my doctor. This was humbling as well as incredibly frustrating as I had a budding career in the fitness industry and my health was really starting to hold me back. I continued to feel worse and started to miss a lot of work and family engagements. Then came the electric nerve pain. I spent a lot of time in emergency rooms over the next decade, first being told I must be having a recurring bladder infection, and then after the tests would come back completely negative, I was told to just take the antibiotics and pain medication anyway. Between the side effects of the antibiotics and the pain, it was a vicious cycle. Though they were not a cure, the antibiotics seemed to help for a couple weeks to a month and then the whole cycle would start over again so I was often on antibiotics every few weeks.
Even though I grew up on the prairies and had at least one tick on me at the end of every summer day, Lyme was never brought up. I had never even heard of Lyme at that time. I have had that bull’s eye rash twice now but no one every told me it could be Lyme. The first time I was tested for skin cancer and was told I must have picked up a mold from climbing on a musty bale on the farm. Being that Lyme can go into remission, it is very difficult to test for it after the rash is gone. In my late twenties I was curled up on my couch having what I now call a ‘flare up’, and reading a fitness magazine to try to keep my mind off of the pain. I came across an article about a woman who had been suffering silently from chronic intense pain. The article had explained how she had loved to go shopping with her daughter and work in her garden but the pain had taken over her life (I felt like I was reading about myself). Her husband came home from work one day to find she had taken her own life. She couldn’t take one more day of the pain. Then the article explained the rare disease she had been diagnosed with and her symptoms. In my head I was saying to myself ‘WAIT, THOSE ARE MY SYMPTOMS’. I went through a lot of emotions after that, mostly anger at first, because for almost a decade I had continually been misdiagnosed. Then I felt an overwhelming sadness and hopelessness, for that woman, and myself, and all the others out there suffering. One doctor had said they thought it might be all in my head so I did feel a sense of comfort for the first time that I was not alone and I was not crazy.
I was hoping it would be smooth sailing after that, but like my ‘chronic fatigue’ I had just found a name for the pain. It was called IC or interstitial cystitis. So I went to an IC specialist. I was then told that there was no cure for the disease and that it could be fatal. I was prescribed Elmiron, a new drug for IC that had had a little success short term. I was warned that over time it likely make me light-headed, give me headaches and make my hair fall out. Even though I paid a few hundred dollars for a few months dose, I could never bring myself to take it. No one could really say what the long term side effects would be. I spoke to a few specialists who told me I had the option of removing my bladder. I remember laying in bed one night thinking, why? Not in a way that I was feeling sorry for myself. I was years past feeling sorry for myself because I realized it only made it worse. I just started asking why. In all other areas of my life I was always asking why but when it came to this debilitating health crisis, I felt immense pressure to just ‘trust the doctors’ and wait for them to find the answers. Yet, they weren’t. IC had taken my twenties away from me and I was tired of being that polite sort of patient. This was my life. That question led me down a rabbit hole that saved my life. It was a turning point where I accepted that I had to take responsibility for my health if I wanted to regain it. At that point I did an elimination diet and this was a turning point. Certain things I eliminated I never introduced back into my diet because almost immediately the painful flares started to be less and less.
Upon regaining my health, I started my makeup line and literally started living again. Although I have had a few flares when my stress levels have gotten too high or because of something acidic I ate, there is not a day that goes by that I am not grateful to be alive and enjoying life. I could not have learned how precious my health was any other way. Shortly after getting my health back my dad found out he had cancer. One thing I remember hearing him say to one of the nurses before he died was that he had ‘demons’ in his belly. That really resonated with me because when I was in pain, I felt like I had demons in me too. I became a different person when I was in pain. No matter what kind of pain it is, I think it starts to break the spirit.
Just like with Lyme, I have learned that something that is really difficult to test for is parasites. The best clinics in the world have admitted this. So just like Lyme, the topic of parasites never came up when I was sick. They never came up when my dad was sick either. I have learned much more about parasites in the past few months than I ever wanted to know. Parasites have been around longer than I have and they are a part of life. Parasites are opportunists. If they feel they are under attack they can easily migrate to another part of the body and go dormant. The body does not always recognize a parasite as a foreign invader because parasites can literally camouflage themselves as part of us. They drill deep into our tissues and muscles and a cyst forms around them. They can live in the human body for years, decades even. They can get to know us better than we might know ourselves, from the inside. They can mess with our hormones so that we feed them what they want. This in turn messes with our emotions. They can slow down our digestion and make us constipate so they have more time to indulge. They thrive in a toxic environment and love sugar and processed foods but they will eat anything. Much like Candida, one can have a few parasites and the body will keep them at bay until they are eliminated and everything will be okay. The problem is when they get out of control. Candida and parasites can actually feed off of each other and that is when they really start to take over.
A few years ago I began feeling like something was just…off. A part of me has always been in fear my IC may someday return. So this frightened me. I got that weird bull’s eye rash again and was feeling really weak. I thought that maybe it was due to the stress of losing my dad. I had a resting tremor that was getting so bad I did not feel comfortable doing makeup applications anymore. I didn’t have any acute IC pain again but I did not feel myself. I could easily sleep for 11 to 12 hours. I had some blood tests done and was told that I was deficient in B12 and Vitamin D. I talked to my doctor a little about long term Lyme and if there was any type of alternative therapy I could try. He recommended ozone therapy. It was expensive but it seemed to make me feel better for a couple months. After that there just seemed to be this low-grade fatigue I always felt. It was nothing compared to the IC pain so I learned to work around it and to just sleep when my body told me to. At times I just felt incredibly irritated and anxious and there was no reason for it. It wasn’t who I am.
A few months ago when I decided it was time for me to move back to the country, I took an afternoon to go visit a husband and wife naturopathic team who had helped me years ago in my journey to healing my IC. They did another live blood test and then politely stated things looked pretty good but that I had a couple parasites. I was appalled and in total denial. However, once I had moved, I started taking the herbs they had given me, just in case. I was still not believing i could have parasites – until a couple mornings later. I noticed I was eliminating what looked like teeny tiny pumpkin seeds. The first morning I didn’t think much of it because i had had seeds on my salad the night before. I remember thinking, can pumpkin seeds shrink?? Then the next morning I saw double the ‘seeds’! This freaked me out because I hadn’t had any seeds on my salad the night before. Wait, how is my body growing seeds??
I was in shock and even after four months I am still in shock. I had parasites. Eggs, larvae, adults – I was riddled with them. I had read up on every ailment and disease but I had never considered the possibility I could have parasites. It makes me wonder how long I have been suffering from a parasitic infection and not known it. Has every other health crisis I’ve had stemmed from parasites? I have had to accept that I may never know, so I am going to concentrate on the healing part. I am feeling so much better health wise, and still improving. This new energy is overriding my shame. I guess I thought I would know if all these little monsters were hanging out and raising families inside of me. When there is an imbalance, not only are they damaging to our insides and stealing our nutrients, they are defecating in the abdomen of their host, releasing formaldehyde, ammonia, and all sorts of yucky chemicals. Their excrement is what causes gallstones. Many diseases could possibly stem from a parasitic infection.
Only 30% of parasites are visible to the naked eye and when dealing with parasites, one has to think about all their cycles and stages. Because they feed on all the garbage and collect heavy metals and viruses inside of them, they must be handled delicately. Their die-off can cause a massive amount of toxins to be released and flood the body. They mate around a full moon so that is when you really want to up the ante! They can lay thousands of eggs every day and these eggs can survive for up to five years. These critters can be picked up in many ways. They can not only live in the body but on your skin. They are EVERYWHERE. They are in meat, poultry, fish, veggies, they can be transmitted under your fingernails to others via cooking, pets, playgrounds, water, pools, sex, kissing, dirt, going barefoot, doorknobs, air. They are everywhere. We have had parasites for hundreds of thousands of years but they were not a problem because there was not the chemicals back then that we have today. I want to leave you with all the positive noticeable changes since I have started cleansing my body of parasites. This is four months into my cleanse. If you have not read my previous post, I share my personal protocol for cleansing parasites: https://hautcacao.ca/eat-pray-zap/
- my painful chronic neck and back pain are 100% gone – parasites tend to settle in the weakest or most wounded areas of the body
- more regulated body temperature, I was either freezing cold or experiencing night sweats
- I am getting a more smooth energy back and I feel very clear headed, better concentration
- my abdomen is flat again after being swollen for a long time, which I thought was a side effect of IC
- I feel an inner strength, calm, and feel in tune and in control of my body and emotions once again
- my resting tremor is disappearing and it is allowing me to do makeup applications again
- I am feeling empowered that I am able to give my body what it needs to heal itself
