Sharing my strategy and how I’ve decreased inflammation and resolved some health issues over the past year.
***Warning: this post contains red eyeball pictures. If that freaks you out, please feel free to skip this post!
Hi friends! I hope that you’re having a great week. Ours has been spent slowly putting the house back together – I’ll share some pics of the new floors soon!- and getting ready for spring travel and adventures.
For today’s post, I wanted to share a bit more about my health journey over the past year and my plan.
Please keep in mind that I’m not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. If you’re struggling with your health, please reach out to your doctor and get the support you need. Also, please don’t take, “you’re going to have to live with this” for an answer. There have been a handful of times in our family where I was told that was the case and it was not true. Sometimes you need a third or fourth opinion, but someone is out there who can help you. You can heal, and you deserve to feel amazing.
This time last year, things went wacky with my eyes. It was a pretty stressful time – the Pilot was traveling a lot, it was dance competition season, and I had to do a few of the dance competitions, and the big Disney trip for the parade solo parenting. It was all fun stuff, but it was a lot. We were getting ready for our end-of-the-year party, planning for Liv’s first communtion, and I was pushing myself the hardest I’d ever pushed with strength training and intervals.
I don’t want to recap the entire story with my eyes – I have a post here, and a podcast episode here – but the nutshell version is that they were neon red for many weeks, and the multiple eye doctors had differing opinions on what caused it. At first they thought it was pink eye – I did antibiotics and it didn’t resolve, and kept coming back – and something had triggered it. The only thing that kept the inflammation down was very intense steriod drops. One doctor wanted me to take them for three to four months!
I kept getting different answers, and after seeing multiple eye doctors, and my PCP, who helped me do some digging, we learned a few things:
– I had blepharitis, which was inflammation of my eyelids, MGD (meibmoian gland dysfunction) and dry eye
– Two markers for Lupus came back positive (ANA and DS-DNA)
– Something was causing inflamamtion in my body
The Lupus thing kind of made sense to me. I’d had random stress rashes over the years, and sometimes my hands would ache. I figured it was because I spent so much time on my phone and typing. I felt low-energy, like all the sleep in the world wouldn’t make me feel rested, and had a hard time recovering from my workouts. I would do one really hard workout, and not be able to work out again for 3-4 days afterwards. I started to get sick more frequently… and when I had the flu, I was in bed for 9 days. I knew something was causing my immune system to be on high alert.
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