My Path Back to My Own Body

Flashback: How It Actually Started

It didn’t start with anxiety or gut problems or heart rhythms.
It started the day I couldn’t hold a cigarette in my mouth.

I was helping a friend move, and every time I tried to clamp the cigarette between my lips, it just fell. The left side felt weak. I shrugged it off and kept working.

Driving back into town, I checked the mirror. My face wasn’t moving right. Part of it looked flat. I had worked years in EMS, so I knew exactly what that could mean. I drove straight to the ER.

The second I walked in, they rushed me to the back. Ten or twelve people surrounded me, calling codes, pushing stroke protocol, telling me I needed to choose immediately whether to take the clot-busting shot. I knew the risks. I’d seen the outcomes. Fifty-fifty: either it saved me or I bled out.

Before they pushed the medication, another doctor walked in. He told everyone to stop. He checked my arms, had me talk, watched my forehead, and then told the whole room to calm down.
“This isn’t a stroke. It’s Bell’s palsy.”

Just like that, the panic was over. They walked away. He told me one side of my face was paralyzed, that sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn’t.

I spent the next two months doing facial exercises. It eventually returned, and I moved on.
But that was the first signal — and I didn’t know how to read it.

What That Episode Really Was

At the time, I thought the Bell’s palsy was a freak event. It came, it went, and I moved on. But looking back, it was the first sign of the same problem that almost destroyed my health later on. It wasn’t a stroke. It wasn’t random. It was the nervous system losing normal communication, and nobody looked past the label long enough to see what that meant. My face came back, but nothing in my body ever stabilized after that. That was the warning I didn’t know how to read.

When I Finally Started Listening

I used to think symptoms were random problems. I thought if I felt bad, there had to be one simple cause. I trusted the people with the credentials to figure it out for me. But I started to notice something: I was improving at times, but I was never stabilizing. No one ever asked why things weren’t holding. I was stuck in a cycle of “you should be fine” while I clearly wasn’t.

The Weight of Not Being Heard

I went from feeling tired and foggy to slowly losing my ability to think clearly. My body weight hit 378 pounds. I was trying to eat better, but nothing made sense. I was tracking symptoms and getting told the tracking was “the problem.” They said I was stressed from the data, but I wasn’t. I was stressed because no one understood what the data meant.

When My Brain Stopped Recognizing My Life

One night, I woke up confused. My memories didn’t match what I was seeing around me. It felt like my brain wasn’t syncing with reality. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, I believe those were early signs of cognitive decline.

I checked my blood sugar because my CGM kept alerting, and no one believed it was accurate. The monitor said 32. The finger poke said 32 too. I knew it was dangerous. I also knew no one was engaging this problem. I had to fight through mental fog just to keep myself alive at night. It was terrifying not knowing if I would wake up okay.

Symptoms With No Ownership

Each time I pushed providers to look deeper, I heard the same thing:
“You look fine,”
“Your labs aren’t that bad,”
“We can do one test, but you should be okay.”

That “one test” turned into eight or nine consecutive tests, each one showing something new. Chronic inflammation. Thick blood. Possible autoimmune issues. Possible Lyme disease. Nobody helped me understand it. I had Bell’s palsy and was told it couldn’t be Lyme because “there are no ticks in Idaho.” I couldn’t believe how little effort went into helping me understand what was happening.

The Heart Problems No One Wanted to Talk About

My chest would pound and pause. I could feel the skipped beats. I studied heart rhythms on my own because nobody ever explained anything. I walked into the ER with extreme blood pressure and a racing heart. They hooked me up, stared at the screen, and said everything looked “fine.”

I asked to see the printout. It showed the same irregular pattern my home monitor had been recording. The hospital monitor behind me was flashing warnings — PVCs, PACs, and bigeminy. That’s when the heart keeps firing in a repeating pattern: one normal beat, one premature beat, over and over. The staff didn’t react, but I did. Anything repeating that precisely isn’t random. It’s a message. It means something mechanical is driving it, and in my opinion, that’s not something you brush off.

I recorded the screen with my phone just so I could review it later. Even with the evidence, nobody explained anything. Later I found the name on my own: a stress-driven rhythm imbalance called dysautonomia. But at the time, the only one listening to my heart was me.

When the Heart Spoke Before Anyone Listened

Before I ever knew the term dysautonomia, my body was already showing the pattern. The strange part was, it didn’t come from fear, exercise, or anything emotional. It would just flip on.

It always started the same way: a sudden jump in heart rate, like someone threw a switch inside my chest. No warning, no panic, no physical trigger. The spike came first. Then came the skips, the pauses, the off-beat rhythm that finally made the monitors light up.

Right before those rhythm changes, there was something else — a deep mechanical pressure behind the chest bone, lined up with the T4–T5 region. Not pain, not soreness. Just a tight signal that something had switched. I didn’t know it back then, but that pressure was the sympathetic nervous system turning on before the rhythm went off.

The problem was, symptoms didn’t always show up at the hospital. So I bought a Wellue Visual Beat chest ECG monitor to track everything myself. That little device caught the exact pattern the ER kept missing: the sudden spike, the pressure behind the chest, then the skipped beats and pauses. I recorded everything with time stamps. I matched symptoms to the rhythm changes beat by beat.

My monitor showed the truth in real time — even when the hospital machines didn’t catch it.
My body spoke clearly.
The problem was never my heart.
It was that no one listened.

Three Years of Needles, Fluids, and No Answers

For three years, I lived in a loop of IV infusions, phleletomy, and hydration therapy. Every two weeks I was back in a chair getting something added, something taken out, or more labs drawn. I didn’t feel like a person trying to get healthy — I felt like a set of numbers they were trying to manage.

They kept treating what they saw on paper, but the numbers kept contradicting each other:
• I was anemic, yet they were removing blood
• I needed hydration, yet I stopped feeling thirst
• My iron was low, yet my blood was thick
• IV Venifer raised my iron temporarily, then it crashed again
• The hormones that should have blocked iron were low instead of high

Nothing added up. They were chasing markers, not causes. I didn’t get better — I just got more complicated. And at the end of three years of being “treated,” I was still unstable.
The only thing those three years gave me was data.
I learned to track myself better than anyone else was tracking me.

The Question No One Wants to Hear

Around the same time I was going to the hospital for the heart issues, something else happened that scared me even more. I started having trouble breathing, and I could feel swelling in my throat. I knew it wasn’t normal, so I went to the hospital. They were trying to help, but then they asked me a serious question:
“Do you want a tracheotomy?”

That hit me hard. I didn’t understand why they were asking something that extreme. They said my throat was swelling and they didn’t know the cause. Part of me panicked because it sounded life-threatening, but another part of me didn’t feel like something matched. I pushed them to explain if I’d still be okay without it. Eventually, they told me I would be fine without the procedure.

It confused me, because that kind of question is meant for a trauma or emergency situation. It didn’t make sense to be asked that if it wasn’t clearly needed.

After I left the hospital, I followed up with my provider. We looked deeper into my inflammation and ran an Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) panel. The test didn’t show an active flare in that exact moment, but the numbers were very high. It showed that EBV was still heavily present in my system even though the flare wasn’t currently active.

Later on, we repeated the EBV panel about 18 months afterward. The first time, my markers were around 750. The second time, they dropped to about 600 — still extremely high, even though they kept labeling it as “not active.” It didn’t add up.

EBV doesn’t leave the body once you get it. It stays dormant and can flare up under stress. That lines up with what happened: the swelling in my throat was most likely part of an EBV flare that was triggered by how overwhelmed and stressed my body already was.

But even with that answer, the rest of my body was still screaming in different directions.

So Many Diagnoses, Still No Clarity

• Fibromyalgia
• Secondary Polycythemia
• Anemia
• Autoimmune markers
• Hormone imbalance
• Chronic inflammation
• Possible pre-leukemia markers
• Low testosterone
• Severe iron issues
• Obesity
• Chronic Active Epstein–Barr Virus disease (CAEBV)
• Idiopathic EBV reactivation syndrome

None of it added up to a real plan. I felt like a list of problems instead of a human being. Every new treatment created a new issue. Long-term prednisone made me feel human but the side effects after stopping made the inflammation worse. TRT thickened my blood. Supplements covered symptoms but distorted my labs. I was chasing numbers, not healing.

There was no plan. No direction. Just reactions. Until something finally clicked.

The Real Turning Point

I realized something simple:
My body wasn’t communicating.

There are two communication systems:
• Fast communication: the nervous system
• Slow communication: the hormones

When those two are out of balance, the whole body gets confused. I had a small adrenal tumor throwing off hormone signaling. I stopped sweating. I stopped being thirsty. My body was conserving water on purpose. That alone can destroy normal regulation.

For the first time, I understood that my issues weren’t separate conditions. They were one problem: a communication breakdown.

Chasing the Wrong Fix

Doctors told me to see nutritionists. None could explain a meal that actually met my needs. I studied plants, digestion, and bioavailability myself. I realized food matters more by function than by labels like “healthy” or “unhealthy.” My stomach wasn’t absorbing correctly, and nobody noticed.

I asked a gastroenterologist for help. The answer was surgery — a bypass. I didn’t want to rush. I wanted to understand first. The nurse told me my labs looked like someone who already had a bypass. That was the first real clue.

Finding Someone Who Finally Listened

I brought years of records to a provider. For the first time, someone said,
“Before we prescribe anything, we need to run the right tests.”
No assumptions. No guessing.

The tests showed:
• Candida overgrowth
• SIBO (bacterial imbalance)
• High histamine response
• Leaky gut indicators

It explained everything:
brain fog, itching, inflammation, nutrient loss, fatigue, immune confusion, hormone imbalance, anxiety, poor cognition, weight issues, and even chronic pain.

Fixing the Real Problem

I started the strict protocol to repair the gut. No manufactured food. No fermented food. Clean proteins only. The first days were rough. Lymphatic drainage, detox symptoms, stomach pain, exhaustion — but they meant something was changing.

And for the first time in years, things started to improve:
• My knees stopped hurting (they were scheduled for replacement five years ago)
• My mind became clear
• Energy returned
• I wasn’t hungry all day
• Weight dropped steadily
• I felt stable, not crashing

I’m down 78 pounds so far, and it’s coming off without starving, without dieting, and without trying to chase weight loss. I now eat twice a day without cravings. I’m averaging around 2,000 calories, high protein, low carbs — and I feel good. Not stimulated. Not medicated. Just regulated.

When the Body Finally Answered Back

After years of being pushed, drained, infused, and monitored, I did something different:
I stopped forcing my body and started listening to how it worked.

Once the gut started to heal and the nervous system wasn’t fighting everything, the labs changed on their own. No IV iron. No TRT. No estrogen blockers. No phlebotomies. Nothing but a body finally allowed to communicate.

The same numbers that never improved with constant treatment began correcting themselves:
• Iron that never budged in three years suddenly rose on its own
• Testosterone climbed from the 70–80 range to around 250 naturally
• Hemoglobin and hematocrit stabilized without pulling blood
• Electrolytes balanced without IV hydration
• Vitamin D levels increased without changing the dosage
• Energy returned without stimulants
• Weight dropped without dieting or hunger

What I Learned

Most people don’t feel bad because of one problem. They feel bad because the body isn’t communicating correctly. When the nervous system and hormones are confused, everything becomes unstable.

You can’t fix the body by chasing each symptom one at a time.
You have to rebuild communication first.

Medication, supplements, and diets can be useful. But if they’re covering up signs of a communication problem, they can trap you in the cycle you’re trying to escape.

Back to Real Homeostasis

When the body is understood mechanically — not just emotionally or symptom-by-symptom — healing becomes logical. You fuel it correctly. You stabilize its signals. You give it what it’s designed to use. Then it can finally do its own job.

The human body is built to repair itself,
but only when we stop interrupting it.