Many years ago, I met a woman through a local internet mothering group who had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Doctors had given her six months to live, and she was determined to prove them wrong. She lived-- truly lived-- for another four years before her death. The woman (whom I’ll call K) entered a healing path even though she was going to be dying in the near future. She was determined to lengthen her life as much as possible. K undertook many holistic healing protocols. Among her discoveries that helped her to find more happiness and more health was facing whom she really was. After two heterosexual marriages that ended in divorce, K finally realized that she was a lesbian. By “coming out,” K found happiness that had been missing all of her adult life.

Around the same time, I was friends with a woman, C, who was in a national internet support group for people with illnesses like mine. We were in and out of each other’s lives via email for quite a while. As we both walked our healing paths, C made a personal discovery. While C identified as pansexual, she’d had many relationships that ended unhappily including a recent divorce. It wasn’t until C realized that he was actually a man named J that deeper healing began for him.

As I watched these two people find happiness as a result of the deep work that chronic illness prompted in their lives, I began to question what was holding me back in my personal healing. Given what both of these two people discovered about themselves, the first things I questioned were my gender and sexual orientation. After much introspection and internet research, I discovered that I was a heterosexual cisgender woman, exactly what I had identified as all my life. Thus, I made no amazing life changing discoveries about my sexuality as my internet friends had done.

I remained puzzled for many years about what was holding my healing back. If it wasn’t my sexuality, then what was it about myself that I needed to find? In my case, it turned out that it was my spiritual self than I needed to rediscover. I had spent the past five lifetimes trying to deny, repress and ignore my metaphysical abilities. Because I grew up in a family in and then married and divorced a man this life ​who aren’t believers in the metaphysical, it didn’t feel safe for me to be my true self. However, a major illness in this lifetime forced me to to come to terms with my metaphysical gifts and my need to use them for healing myself and others.

For many people facing chronic or terminal illness, finding oneself is one of the challenges that can help alleviate a great deal of emotional pain and suffering. Because our emotional pain often manifests as physical pain in our body, finding oneself can sometimes bring improvement or even remission of one’s physical misery. Regardless of its impact on one’s physical symptoms, being true to oneself always brings happiness that was previously unknown in this life. There is nothing comparable to being able to say, “This is whom I am. I am proud of me, and I love being me.”

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Full disclosure: I am friends with the owners of Medsavers Pharmacy. However, they did not ask me to write this blog post. The opinions expressed are entirely mine.

One of the problems of chronic illness is the cost of prescription drugs that are needed. Drug costs keep rising, and insurance companies are becoming more stubborn about not paying for drugs that patients need. A study by AARP reports, "In 2013, retail prices for 227 widely used brand name prescription drugs increased by 12.9 percent." The study also notes, "Brand name drug prices increased more than eight times faster than general inflation in 2013 (12.9 percent versus 1.5 percent)." Other drugs increased as much as 113% over eight years. Yet in 2013,the cost of living increase for Social Security payments was only 1.5%; in some recent years it was 0%. 

I have most of my drugs compounded. This means that the pharmacy takes the drug powder which they obtain from the manufacturer and put it in gelatin capsules in the correct doses for me. If filler is needed, they use probiotics. It means there are no food colorings, no dyes, no artificial flavorings, and no gluten in the pills. For me, it's the difference between tolerating most drugs and not tolerating them. It also allows us to create non-standard doses that aren't usually available. For example, I take between 7mg and 9 mg of one drug four times a day. It's only available in 10 mg, 25 mg, 50 mg, and 75 mg dosing in the standard pills. For me, the 10 mg would be too much. Because I need my drugs compounded, I am limited to using compounding pharamcies. The one I normally use is also a regular pharmacy, and I usually get any prescriptions the rest of my family needs there as well. It's a small local business with only two stores, and I appreciate that the staff there recognizes me.

One of my sons has been facing health problems for the past six months. We finally got a true diagnosis, and he's begun treatement, involving flower essences, herbs and Western drugs. One of the drugs was no issue; my son's prescription insurance through his father covered it with no problem. The second drug the insurance company refuses to cover at a rate that the pharamcies can afford because it's less than the pharmacy's costs. They end up having to sell it at a loss, so many of them refuse to dispense it. I asked the pharmacy what it would cost if we paid out of pocket, and I was told $450 for the 30 days supply we needed. Eeks. 

At that point, I called Medsavers Pharmacy. Medsavers does not accept insurance, and they only stock generic drugs. These two things allow them to sell drugs at a lower cost than most pharmacies. If a patient needs a prescription drug, then Medsavers will order it but the patient must obtain a prescription for the entire bottle. When we had older dogs with health problems (including congestive heart failure and Cushing's disease), we actually got a large percentage of their drugs at Medsavers because it was so much cheaper than buying them through a vet. 

The woman who answered the phone at Medsavers was pleasant and let me know that they didn't carry that particular dose of this drug, so we would need to get a prescription for the entire bottle from our doctor. The total cost for the entire bottle which would last my son a month? $62.42. That's versus the $450 I got quoted at my compounding pharmacy. So I got the doctor to write the prescription as needed asking him to respect the almost $400 difference between the two pharmacies. Because the doctor is very sensitive to patient's financial issues, he had no problem doing so. I've known many friends with prescription insurance who've used Medsavers for some of their prescriptions because it was cheaper to pay out of pocket at Medsavers than to pay a copay at another pharmacy. That's essentially what we did here. 

Medsavers Pharmacy advertises themselves as specializing in helping uninsured customers. They are centrally located in Austin, and they will ship wherever it is legal to do so. I think Medsavers is a fabulous example of a business which works to help those in need yet at the same time is a financially profitable business for the owners. It is possible to help others without engaging in extortion, though our health industry would like us to believe otherwise.


© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Since I started dealing with late disseminated Lyme disease over twelve years ago, I have had to nap almost every day. It's not an option for me to stay awake: my body shuts down every afternoon whether I want to keep going or not. There is nothing I can do to stop it. By 3 pm every day, if I haven't gotten a nap, I may be curled up on the floor in an office building somewhere because I can't force myself to move another step. Most days I fall asleep at 1 or 2, but some days I don't even make it to 11 or 12 before I absolutely must nap. It's like the baby who falls asleep in his high chair at the dinner table: nothing can stop sleep when it hits hard.

One of the crueler things that people unintentionally say to me surrounding my illness is that I am "so lucky" to get to take a nap daily or how they wish they could take a nap as often as I do. While I understand what they are saying about craving more sleep, what they are actually saying is coming from a place of ignorance about my health issues and their true impact. I've even had others with chronic fatigue syndrome or late disseminated Lyme disease tell me to just skip a nap on a certain day in order to attend an event. Clearly their health issues do not come with the same severity of restriction that mine do.

The problem with napping daily is that it really interferes with life. I can't easily book appointments in the afternoon. I can't do social activities in the afternoon. I have to book in my daily nap. I sleep 2-4 hours in the afternoon (usually 2), and then I will sleep another 8-10 hours at night (usually 8-9). That means I am sleeping 10-13 hours per day compared to the average adult who needs 7-9 hours but gets less than 7. One can quickly see that means that I have 3-6 less waking hours per day than the average adult which adds up to 21-42 hours a week. That's as much as a part-time or full-time job!

Thus, it's very difficult for me to respond politely to those who make comments about how they wish they could nap as often as I do. I almost always reply that I wish it wasn't a requirement for me but my health necessitates it. Most people realize at that point that they have really stuck their feet in their mouths and backpedal with awkward comments about how they know I have health problems but they still wish they could get more sleep. It's one of those conversations that I know will never end well.

Thus, if I can not meet your requests for a mid-afternoon appointment time, please know that it is not for a lack of wanting to be able to help you at that hour. It's simple biological reality for me that I will be asleep at that time. I currently do book late afternoon, weekend and evening appointments on occasion to help clients who are also limited in their scheduling availability. I look forward to the day, though, when I can give up my naps and I am able to work a 9-5 day just like the majority of the population.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(I am reviewing an Advance Reader Copy of this book won through Goodreads’ First Reads program.)

I came to Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth by Jim Rendon as a woman who has endured PTSD caused by multiple sources: abuse, childbirth, health trauma, and if you believe in past lives, World War II. I have been able to achieve major healing with most of my wounds through alternative therapies; conventional therapy was only serving to retraumatize me. Yet as someone with a Ph.D., I have a great deal of respect for science and the advances it can help bring. Rendon's work questions why so many people who have endured traumas and PTSD are able to come to a place of positive growth through examining the influence of personal narratives, community support, honest communication, optimistic thinking, religion, creative outlets, physical exercise, fellow sufferers, and therapy. The studies and examples Rendon cites demonstrate that these factors can all contribute to a lifelong positive change.

Rendon’s work is firmly grounded in scientific studies which demonstrate how trauma can lead to growth. The book is well-researched, fluently integrated and easy to read. Rendon’s writing style makes academia accessible to the general public. Despite the heavy topic, I breezed through Upside much quicker than I read most nonfiction books. The stories Rendon relates about others who have suffered traumas are painful to read, but only one was horrifying to me because of the explicit violence it contains. (For those who are highly sensitive like me, I recommend skipping the details in the last chapter on Jake Harriman's trauma, an event that occurred in the war in Iraq.)

Rendon was drawn to the topic of post-traumatic growth because his father was a Holocaust survivor; he makes no indication of having endured major trauma in his own life either explicitly or implicitly. There were times where I felt his text would have benefited from an extra reading and feedback before publication by those who have lived through trauma themselves because Rendon’s perspective sometimes doesn’t quite grasp the full reality. However, for the most part, Rendon does an excellent job of vividly relating the pain and the growth that his subjects experienced. He also gives one of the best summaries I’ve read about how PTSD creates a hypersensitive response in individuals whose “fight or flight” response is perpetually in overdrive. The first few chapters of the book could be incredibly helpful to someone trying to understand their loved one’s new reactions to the world.

If one were to survey the trauma-inducing events that Rendon discusses in detail, one would conclude that trauma is caused by cancer, accidents, warfare, and natural disasters. I realize that Rendon had limited space in his book, but he chose to relate cancer patient after cancer patient’s experience. This is typical of our culture which actually creates additional trauma for those who aren’t enduring cancer: they are second class citizens in the world of medical trauma. This blog post discusses how Lyme patients like me are abandoned by friends and medical practitioners in their search for health while simultaneously being told, “At least it isn’t cancer.” By not addressing other illnesses beyond cancer and accidents, Rendon contributes to the cultural mythologies of what illnesses “should” look like.

My largest complaint about Upside is that it contains a blatant disregard for women’s traumas. It was not until chapter five that Rendon discussed a female case study; from there on, women were mentioned fairly regularly in the book. However, Rendon does not discuss a single case of rape, sexual harassment, or abuse in detail. These are major causes of trauma, but they are barely mentioned in passing and there are no specific examples of them in the text. Most frustrating to me was how Rendon described trauma from childbirth: “People can be traumatized from the happiest of situations: childbirth.” While on one level this is a true statement, on another level it shows a total lack of understanding for the epidemic proportioned reality of what most women still endure during childbirth in our nation. There are two primary times when no doesn’t mean no: when a woman is being raped or when she is in labor. Had Rendon taken the time to talk with women who have experienced what is known as “birth rape” in some circles or tbose who have lost their babies, he would not have made such a flippant comment about the joy of childbirth, and the trauma around childbirth would likely have merited more than a few brief paragraphs in this work.

I will definitely recommend Upside to many clients, primarily the family members and friends of those enduring traumas around war, cancer, or accidents. I will also recommend it to individuals who, as Rendon notes in the text, have already come to the recognition on their own that their traumas can serve for positive growth. The book would serve well in a college classroom of psychology, medical, nursing or social work students trying to begin to understand trauma. However, for those who are dealing with childbirth trauma, rape, or abuse, Upside is not necessarily the best place to find information about healing.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

One of the quickest ways to piss me off is to tell me directly or indirectly that my pain is not real. I’ve spent the past 12+ years living in chronic pain. I don’t function in the world in the way most people can because of that pain and the associated disabilities that come along with it. No part of my life has been untouched because of what I have endured. Yet despite knowing I am a much happier and better person now than I was 12 years ago, I wouldn’t wish the hell I’ve been through on anyone; the only exception to that is when someone tells me that my pain doesn’t exist. Then I would like those people to spend a month in my body. I would bet you anything that when they came out of my body after having spent a month literally walking (or unable to walk at all on some days) in my shoes, they would be singing a very different tune.

Today, I managed to let someone push this button of mine yet again. In a discussion about the overprescription of antidepressants in our society on Facebook, I put up a links to blog post I had written that talks about Lyme patients being erroneously misdiagnosed as depressed and put on antidepressants rather than the physicians actually looking for the real problem. I also linked another post I had written about how depression is sometimes caused by issues beyond brain chemistry but that most Western doctors are ignorant of those other causes. One of the people involved in the discussion, clearly not my lifelong friend, immediately responded that chronic Lyme does not exist and there’s no scientific proof that it does. Wow. You mean like this recently released study from a researcher at Northeastern University talking about the biological mechanism through which borrelia burgdorferi survives the standard antibiotic doses recommended by the CDC? That kind of evidence?

This is the point at which I hit the block button on Facebook. I have a zero tolerance policy for people who will directly attack me or my life. If you want to believe differently than I do, that’s your choice, but don’t tell me directly and rudely that my diagnosis doesn’t exist and that the pain I’m in isn’t real. What was most stupefying to me was that this person stated that she has a mental illness that requires antidepressants. I would bet that at some point at her life she has been told that she just needs to pull herself up by her bootstraps and she’ll be fine. Mental illnesses are still not accepted by our society, and they are poorly understood. However, that doesn’t give this woman the right to turn around and tell others their diseases don’t exist either. Compassion to all who are suffering is appropriate even if you don’t agree with their diagnosis or choice of medical treatment.

The cyberbullying that our culture continues to foster in this regard is amazing. So many people believe that they are anonymous on the internet. They don’t have a problem spewing hateful words and demeaning obscenities at total strangers. Somehow the internet creates a situation that causes people to forget their basic manners. Most of the time strangers are polite to each other in public, but the internet removes that civility and results in a great deal of anger and pain.

Last week on The Bachelorette: The Men Tell All, host Chris Harrison and bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe addressed the problem of cyberbullying. Bristowe has made choices that not everyone agrees with this season, and she has been the recipient of a lot of vitriolic criticism as a result. During the show last week, Harrison read some of the worst of the tweets that Bristowe has received including death threats. As he read the tweets (with the usernames blacked out to protect the not-so-innocent), Bristowe’s eyes filled with tears. A great number of the comments on Twitter at that point were in support of The Bachelorette’s decision to address cyberbullying. However, many were not. Even some people whom I usually find to be fairly level-headed and rational disparaged the decision to discuss this topic. I read quite a few attacks on Harrison for “torturing” Bristowe by reading those comments out loud. From what I can tell of Harrison, he is a genuinely nice guy who did not pull this discussion about cyberbullying out of thin air. I’m positive he had Bristowe’s consent before he started especially based on the quiet comments he made to her as they went to commercial break. Bristowe’s genuine tear-filled response was important for America to see even if (or especially because) it makes us uncomfortable. Those users on the internet whom the cyberbullies are attacking have real feelings and real emotions. The tears and pain are real, too. The mere fact that so many people bristled against this discussion shows how desperately it is needed. If television stars and societal leaders aren’t willing to speak up against this kind of bullying behavior, change will be much slower in bringing about its end.

I’ve mentioned before that I left online dating, tired of the rude behavior and horrid comments about overweight women. What was clear to me in the world of online dating and again today on Facebook is that cyberbullying is real. Compassion is sorely lacking on the internet. Our world is full of so many wonderful reasons for living, and the internet brings about so much positive change in the world in ways that couldn’t have happened before its existence. It is long past time for that change to include an end to discriminatory words, hateful posts, and demeaning responses. We can be better than this as a society.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

On Tuesday, I was experiencing the worst fibromyalgia flare I've had in a very long time; it's been so long that I can't even remember when the last time I even had a fibro flare was. I initially couldn't figure out why exactly this flare was happening, though I was told by higher powers that it was related to Lyme. Usually fibromyalgia flares for me are due to stress, chemical exposure, gluten, or viral triggers, but none of those applied in this case. Eventually I pinpointed it to a series of events tied to Lyme dying off, raising my blood sugar, and thereby creating a better environment for feeding the candida in my body which was in turn causing the fibro flare. When I have pain like that, there's not a lot I can do that help: Even laying down perfectly still doesn't help much, and drugs barely touch the pain.

Tuesday also happened to be the first day of summer vacation when my kids were at my house. Of course, that means none of them were actually here for one part of the day as my chauffeur duties increase during the summer. The youngest is at a neighborhood camp as a CIT this week. My daughter wanted to go swimming at a friend's house; the friend only lives three miles away but it requires a parental ride to get there and back. My older son wanted to go golfing with friends at a local driving range, so I needed to drop him off there as well. I was doing all of this with major pain wracking my body. 

On the way home from dropping the older two off, I returned via a stoplight that is long and painful to get through. It often takes two cycles to make it through the light, and since the light is timed in favor of the other direction, that takes a while. Because it is such a slow yet busy signal, it's also a favorite place for the homeless to stand requesting money. When I arrived at the stoplight, I was in a great deal of pain after 35 minutes of driving, and I just wanted to get home. I knew I was right on the edge of the number of cars that would get through in the first cycle of the light, so I was really hoping everyone in front of me was paying attention so I could get through on the first cycle and get home.

Four cars in front of me was an Austin Police Department car. As traffic started moving forward, the police vehicle's lights came on. I assumed that the person in front of the police car had lights out or something similar and were about to be pulled over. However, as we got closer to the traffic light, the police car came to a stop and the driver's door opened. I was utterly frustrated because I knew that this meant I wouldn't get through the light in the first cycle. The police officer had stopped immediately next to an older homeless man holding a cardboard sign, and I began to worry that he was getting out to ticket the homeless man for panhandling as there are local laws against pandhandling in roadways. While I agree that panhandling is a major issue in Austin, it was obvious this man was homeless and in need of assistance, and in those cases, my heart goes out to those who are so limited in their resources that they have no choice but to beg in order to survive. I really didn't want to see this homeless guy get harrassed. 

What happened then completely surprised me. Instead of berating the homeless man, the police officer handed him a brown paper grocery bag. The officer lifted out the contents to show the homeless man what was in it: clothing. It was only then that I noticed that the homeless man was wearing what appeared to be a woman's housedress or a long hospital gown. The homeless man was truly appreciative, accepted the bag, and then stuck out his hand to shake the officer's hand in gratitude. The officer shook his hand, got back in his car, turned off the lights, and drove forward to the now red light.

At that point, I started to cry, so moved by what I had just witnessed. It was nothing like what I had expected. Even though I was still in pain and still wanted desperately to get home, I was grateful that the Universe had made me slow down to witness this act of compassion when I least expected to see it. As I sat in my car at the light, I watched the homeless man very slowly walk to the highway underpass area, sit down, and then very painstakingly start to slip on the pants that were previously in the bag. Clearly he had mobility impairments, and this was a challenge for him, but the fact that he was putting on the clothes then and there told me how happy he was to have them.

It's a sad statement that seeing an act of compassion like this one is so rare in our society that it would move me to tears. So many people are struggling to survive on even the most basic of levels such as finding shelter, restrooms, clothing, food, and water. We all have our challenges and struggles in this world, though some problems are more acute than others. It will be an amazing day when our society is able to figure out how to move past greed to a point that ensures that all of us have our basic needs met without having to beg for it to happen. I'm glad that I was able to witness this small step in that direction.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(Please note that these recommendations are not paid for or compensated by the companies mentioned in any way. They are simply my personal recommendations of what we use in my household.)

Until one has to deal with the pain of arthritis or a similar restriction in one’s hands, one doesn’t realize how much we depend on them for basic tasks. Lyme has unfortunately created pain in my hands that is termed “Lyme arthritis”; many who have Lyme but don't realize it are misdiagnosed with arthritis. Recently I was wishing my children were at my house that day because ironically I needed help opening a childproof medicine cap that my hands were too pained to open that day. However, it goes beyond the obvious difficulties of opening jars and bottles, fastening buttons, or negotiating jewelry clasps. There are days when I struggle with many tasks that most people don’t even think twice about tackling.

One such issue, superficial though it may be, is the issue of dry skin on rough heels. Like many in this part of the world, I wear sandals the majority of the year. This leaves my heels open to exposure, beating them up quite a bit. A few years ago, a few women in my wider social circle highly recommended the PedEgg as better than any pumice stone they’d ever used. I bought one and had to agree: The PedEgg does work much better than a pumice stone. However, I found it very painful to hold and use for the amount of time that was necessary to begin working on the skin on my heels. This is something most people wouldn't have to worry about.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was on Amazon looking for something else, and Amazon suggested the Amopé Pedi Perfect electronic pedicure foot file. It was an “as seen on tv” product and certainly seemed too good to be true. However, tired of being able to scratch up my opposing leg accidentally with my heels during the night while I was sleeping, I decided to give it a try. Despite my reservations, the Pedi Perfect actually turned out to be a purchase that was well worth the $30 investment. The file works amazingly well, smoothing off incredibly rough dead skin with very little effort on the part of the user. The handle on it is wide enough to make for a comfortable grip for my weakened hands. The device requires very little pressure to be effective; too much pressure actually renders the Pedi Perfect useless. The only complaint I have about it is that it there is no device for collecting the skin dust which flies off in all directions including becoming an inhalation risk. I’d recommend using the Pedi Perfect over the bathtub or other similar collection area.

A popular saying claims that it’s the little things that make us happy. I have to agree that the Pedi Perfect is one of those little things which has made my life happier in a miniscule way. A task that was previously too challenging for me to handle is now easy and painless to perform. Sometimes technology can really make life a little easier!

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I am one of those people who had recurring nightmares as a child. One of them was induced by the dinosaur scene in Fantasia, one of the first movies I saw in 1977 at the age of 3; I figured this out in high school during science class when a film showed a clip from Fantasia that exactly resembled my dreams. I still can’t watch that video clip without disturbing emotions coursing through my body. Until recently, I never understood what the other recurring childhood dream was actually about or where it came from, but it was terrifying for me. I’m not sure how often I would have it as a child or even when I stopped having it, but decades later, I still remember it in vivid and nauseating detail. 

Over the past few years, I’ve learned a great deal about my past life in Europe that ended during World War II. My spirit guides have given me the information slowly, piece by piece, during many different meditation and bodywork sessions. I have an enormous amount of information on that life, perhaps because it was so recent and so powerful, but more likely because I have had so much healing work to do around it. What has become very obvious to me over the years as I worked through the issues that have come up is that most of my current life could be described as PTSD from my last life. So many of the decisions I’ve made or the fears I’ve had are direct results of what happened then.

The basics of what I know is that I was born around 1920 as a woman to lower class parents who lived somewhere in rural England; I’m not sure where exactly. I had a sister who was beloved to me and a grandmother whom I was very close to, but I don’t know much about other family members aside from some basics about my parents. When I was a young teenager, I left school against my wishes to go into service at the home of a local minor nobility. This man was an alcoholic and a generally miserable controlling person. He had a daughter whom he’d sired at 20 with the family’s secretary; the daughter was five years older than me. As he aged, he was getting much more desperate for a male heir. Thus, when he forced me to have sex with him and I got pregnant, he actually married me despite the 25 year age difference and my lower class origins. Much to his dismay, I miscarried midway through the pregnancy, possibly due to the chlamydia that he had given me. Despite his best efforts, I did not become pregnant again, and I assumed I was sterile.

From there, my life became crazier than what one would normally expect for a wife of that class and era. I began having sex with a neighbor; my husband was not pleased about the affair but turned a blind eye because our distaste for each other was so great at that point. I also had an affair with the step-daughter metioned above. When World War II began, I jumped at the chance for adventure and escape from my husband, and I became a British spy who was sent abroad. I slept my way across Europe: I’ve seen at least four men whom I was sexually involved with but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. The sexual activity was for both business and pleasure. One of those affairs resulted in a pregnancy which I had illegally terminated.

For a long time I questioned how I could have gone from my simple English origins to being a spy in Germany. It just didn’t make sense to me. However, I eventually was shown that my father was a German Jewish immigrant to England; my mother was a native and an Anglican. I was raised bilingual. There were other German-speaking Jews in our community as well. Thus, I was someone who would have been optimal to serve the British government best in the war: A woman who could pass as a native German without arousing suspicion. I worked my way through France to Germany, though I’m not sure how long I was actually in France. It may have been just one fateful train ride (and romantic hookup). In Germany, I was working at a military factory as part of my spy work, but I was also secretly doing relief work for a Jewish refugee camp for immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Sometime last year, I finally made the connection between my childhood recurring dream in this life and my past life in Germany during World War II. On the day when I finally understood what the dream was about, I had a complete and total emotional meltdown. I called my therapist for an emergency phone session; in her words, I was confronting true evil in its darkest sense. As I talked to her on the phone while pacing the back porch, green dragonflies were literally circling around me, an unusual occurrence in my yard. Symbolically, dragonflies are “connected to the symbolism of change and light.” Their green color related to my heart chakra, indicating the change in my energy relating to love and compassion. In retrospect, the symbolism couldn’t have been any more powerful.

Most of us were taught the horror stories of what happened to Jews and others in the concentration camps in Germany, but the worst of it didn’t make it into the history books. The things I saw during the war and then in my recurring dreams in this life were so horrific that I don’t discuss them with most people (including here on the blog) because they would be traumatizing for most highly sensitive people, empaths or those who had family members who were lost or killed during those terrible years. However, once I had calmed down many weeks later, I consulted one of of the professors who had been on my dissertation committee and who has published a book on the concentration camps. He confirmed for me that what I had seen was highly suspected and had been hinted at in cultural artifacts. It’s just not something that has ever been widely published.

My soul was deeply traumatized by what I witnessed and participated in during World War II. There are no words to express it all. This created the spiritual root for the Lyme disease and many other traumas I endured during my current life. I truly believed at the soul level that I deserved to suffer terribly for my part in the war even though I was acting as a spy when I took the actions I did. When I first began having major health problems in 2003 and 2004, I used to tell people, “I must have been a Nazi in a past life to deserve this kind of suffering.” My subconscious knew what was going on at a soul level.

The past few months have involved a great deal of work reprogramming my body to undo the damage from World War II that I brought into this life. The stored emotions, entities, and pain had to be released so that I can heal completely. That release has involved a great deal of physical and emotional pain as I addressed the issues, let them surface, and then removed them from my body, often with the help of the various healers on my team.

Last Monday, we hit an apex of healing. In what seems absolutely unimaginable and unrealistic, my body manifest an actual lump in my abdomen in the area of my liver that was a result of one of the bullets that killed me somewhere around 1941. While the bullet from the past life was not literally there, the lump was real. Two different healers were able to palpate it and sense the pain from it. Using several crystals and flower essences as well as energy work, we were able to dissolve that large lump. The whole situation was amazing to experience, yet I am so grateful to have that energetic bullet gone. My healing is not yet over; we continue to clean out whatever comes up. I am not sure how much more there is to go, but removing that bullet was key to my healing. 

I have been given the names of my husband and me in that life, and someday I hope to be able to go to Britain and do research to find more information though I suspect a great deal of it is still classified. I also may go back to Germany someday to the city where I was stationed and attempt to find complete peace with what happened there. My body was never returned to England, but I suspect it was put in an unmarked grave. I also doubt there are any remnants of the other activities I was involved in during my past life, but I still would like to see and experience the area again, this time under the banner of compassion, healing and peace.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When one struggles with major health issues, especially ones that have been as life changing as the ones I have faced courtesy of late disseminated Lyme disease, one learns to find the bitter blessings in places that one never would have previously found them. When faced with struggles and challenges, the silver lining almost always seems to be present if you can set your mind to find it. It’s that ability to see the “little” things that can make it possible to accomplish what seem like insurmountable difficulties on a daily basis. Those challenges include simple outings that most wouldn’t see as a big deal at all.

Earlier this week, my Bachelor/ette watching buddy in New York and I were alerted to a book signing with Chris Harrison, the host and one of the producers of the show, from our favorite blog on the show. The Barnes and Noble bookstore in Austin at which it was being held is only ten minutes from my house. As we messaged back and forth, my friend helped me get the enthusiasm to face the possibly insurmountable challenge of attending Wednesday night. Quite honestly, if the treatment I am undergoing right now hadn’t hit a breakthrough point on Monday, I couldn’t have gone; last week it would have been impossible. Next week it might be impossible again, but on Wednesday at around 5 pm, I realized my health was actually going to allow me to do this.

However, I’ve had false starts with many events in the past. I don’t get my hopes up until I am actually engaged in the event. I know all too well that it could all fall apart before I get there due to health-based logistical complications. Furthermore, I haven’t attended an indoor event with a large crowd of random people in a chemically saturated environment since 2004. That’s 11 years. The last time I walked in a bookstore was also probably in 2004. While I’ve been able to do much more over the past two years than I previously could, especially than in the six years that I was homebound and the two that I was almost bedbound, I still had no idea if my body was going to be able to handle it. I was worried about parking (because anyone who lives in north Austin can tell you that the parking lot at the Arboretum is weird and often overcrowded). I was concerned about too large of a fragrant crowd wearing perfumes that my body can’t tolerate, and I worried about the store itself being more than my chemical sensitivities could handle. As a result, I took my grocery list with me since Whole Foods is only a few blocks away. Then, if I had to leave without attending the book signing, I would not feel like the effort of getting dressed and heading out was a complete loss. I’ve learned from past events that this is one of the things I need to do to find a silver lining when an event falls through for me.

When I arrived at the parking lot, all of the five or six disabled spots were taken, but someone walked up to his car in one of them as I pulled up. I offered gratitude to whatever higher powers gave me the closest possible parking spot and headed in hoping that was a sign of good things to come. It was. I was able to tell from the parking lot and the noise level when I walked in the store that the crowd was not huge; at that point it was probably only 50 people though by the end of the night it was likely closer to 125. Feeling confident, I bought a copy of The Perfect Letter, and then headed to the second floor area where the signing was taking place. Here I met the first challenge of the evening: The escalators to the second floor were either broken or turned off. So I was left with a choice: Either walk to the far end of the store where the elevator is and then traverse back to the gathering area, or climb the escalators manually. Which was least taxing on my body? Since my knees weren’t in bad shape last night, I opted for climbing the escalator which my body handled.

Upon reaching the second floor balcony area, I faced the next major challenge: There were no more available chairs. It was already standing room only with about ten people mulling around. Given the pain and issues in my lower half of my body right now, standing right now for more than about five minutes is a physical impossibility for me. I approached an employee, let her know that I am disabled, and verified that it was ok to just sit on the floor. I’ve been at other events at other locations in the distant past where employees get very snippity about fire marshall rules and not sitting: SRO means literally standing. However, this employee didn’t seem to care, so I sat next to a bookcase where I could get partial back support. In retrospect, I wish I’d brought my backjack, but it’s a lesson learned for similar future events I might attend. At past points in my life, I would have been very self-conscious about the fact that I was the only person sitting on the floor, but after so many years of bodily limitation, I’ve learned to do what I need for my body and ignore any judgment, verbal or nonverbal, that comes my way.

After Chris Harrison spoke for an hour, the area was rearranged for the actual book signing which was done in order of wristband grouping. I was somewhere in the middle of the crowd, but there was no way I could stand in the line to wait. I approached the employee who was the gatekeeper for things, let her know my situation, and asked if I could go sit in a chair until it was my turn. She was quite friendly and willing to accommodate; I know she’d seen me sitting on the floor through the earlier part of the event. When my group got to the front of the line, I let her know that I was willing to wait until the end of that group if she would just call me up when it was my turn. Most mercifully, she immediately plopped me at the front of the line at that point since I’m guessing my face was starting to show my pain and fatigue levels at that point. I got my photo (above) and my book signed and headed out, walking back down the escalators.

The recovery process began when I got to my car as I had to just sit there for a few minutes and let my body decompress from the work it had just done for me. Once I got home, I began doing the things I have to do to support my liver in detoxification to ensure that I wouldn’t get a migraine or a fibromyalgia flare from the event.  By the time I headed to bed two hours later, my body was very cranky about what I had put it through, though after an hour of in ice pack on the worst pain, I was able to fall asleep. The next morning my body was very sore, but I can’t tell how much of the pain I have was from the event and how much was from the therapeutic treatments I had on Wednesday morning.

So after all that, was it worth it? Absolutely. I picked a great speaker for my return to book events. It’s not always the case that someone who is a good author or a great tv star makes an equally entertaining public speaker, but in this case, Chris Harrison is just as successful in front of a crowd as he is in front of the camera. I never know how much other people perceive of what I pick up on, but to me, it seemed as though Harrison was actually a bit nervous for the first few minutes as he began talking. By the time he switched to the question and answer part of the evening, Harrison was totally in his element. The fabulous sense of humor that we see glimpses of on The Bachelor/ette came through loud and clear as he talked extemporaneously on whatever topics the crowd quizzed him on. Harrison also maintains a grounded sense about him despite the circles he travels in. When he discusses people such as Matthew McConaughey or Nicholas Sparks, he isn’t dropping names or showing off. He’s just talking about the guys he’s spent some time with.

The evening was filled with a great deal of laughter, and I felt like I came away from it with a better understanding of the behind the scenes efforts that go into making The Bachelor/ette. I would have loved to engage with Harrison about a few of the issues I have with the show, but given that I was on the floor in the back and that I know my questions aren’t the typical ones, I just chose to enjoy others’ questions instead. I was thoroughly engaged for the entire evening. If I’d had to pay an admission price beyond the optional buying of a book, it would have still been worth it. An evening with Chris Harrison makes for fabulous entertainment!

Part of why I enjoy The Bachelor/ette so much is because of the allure of the travel. The idea of international or even domestic travel is still a fantasy in my life, so watching others enjoy their travels gives me hope for when I am able to travel as well. Even though attending this book signing might seem like a small step toward travel to most, my closest friends recognize what a huge step forward it was for me in the long journey of my recovery. As part of that slow movement forward, I find great pleasure in rediscovering the world around me that I haven’t been able to engage with for so long. I would bet money that I was the only one at the book signing who found incredible awe and pleasure in the setting. Seeing so many books on the shelves was a truly amazing sight for me, almost as though I had never walked in a bookstore before. I am so grateful for this illness-induced perspective on life that lets me find the wonder in things that most people wouldn’t think twice about. This awe for our society and the world around us is one of the things I hope that I carry away from living with chronic illness and keep with me for the rest of my life.

UPDATE 5/28/15: I sent this post to the manager at this location of Barnes and Noble who was in charge of the event. He responded quickly and politely, apologizing for the first bookseller who did not follow the proper procedure for helping the disabled; he will be addressing the issue with her so that she is fully informed for future events. He let me know that there are always additional seats held back for situations like mine so that I should not have needed to sit on the floor. He also explained that the store has wheelchairs available for helping to get customers to the second floor area, a courtesy I would not have expected. Finally, he said that the escalators are always turned off for events like this because of noise issues but that they are easily turned on and off at a moment's notice for a situation like mine. I appreciate all of this information so that any future experiences I have at that store will be much more accessible for me.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance

When my ex-husband’s grandmother was in her late 80s, her health began to fail. She complained bitterly to me on one visit that she had to take TWO pills every day. TWO!!! For her, this was an unimaginable travesty. Given that I had to take two allergy pills daily at the age of 20, I was less than impressed by this horrific fate she was dealing with. However, it was a matter of perspective. She’d been in excellent health all of her life, but now she was facing decline. Two pills was symbolic of the end to her.

For those who deal with chronic illness, the idea of only taking two pills a day is a funny joke. Taking that few pills is no different than brushing one’s teeth: It's just a basic part of daily life. Right now, I take 13+ Western medical drug capsules per day. Then there are the supplements. Unlike Western drugs which are chemically based and therefore often quite small in size, herbal supplements are not compact. They often require multiple pills per supplement daily in order to get the necessary dose. I don’t even keep track of the total number of pills anymore, but it’s in the dozens per day. Whenever I see new practitioners, they look at my list of supplements and immediately declare, “You are taking too many things.” However, once we review the list and I tell them what each supplement is for and what side effects I have when I stop it, they agree that I shouldn't mess with the system I have going which helps keep my body relatively stable and decreases my pain levels.

Managing all of those supplements requires a system of organization that most individuals with health issues work out after a while. Opening a dozen bottles at every meal each day gets tedious. The typical pill keepers on the market are meant for someone taking only a few small Western drugs per day. They’re pretty pointless for someone using large numbers of herbal supplements. Early in my illness, a fellow patient showed me her technique for managing pills: An organizer she found at the hardware store for sorting nuts, bolts, and nails. I picked a similar plastic box organizer (pictured above), and it has become vital to my supplement management. These can be found at craft stores, organizer stores, hardware stores, and superstores. My supplement doses change regularly, so I prefer not to mete out more than five days at a time lest I have to redo them. On every fifth day, though, I sit down and listen to music for 15 minutes while I fill my supplement box. As I fill the box, I try to integrate mindfulness meditation into the process: I remember consciously what each supplement is for, and I ask for help in achieving its goal.

Keeping track of the doses of each supplement is also a task when one’s mind is filled with brain fog. My practitioners taught me to write the dose on the lid or label using a permanent marker. However, for those with chemical sensitivities, it’s often difficult to tolerate the chemicals in markers. An alternate solution is to write the dose on self-adhesive labels and stick them on the lid or bottle. I also keep an up-to-date list of supplements on my computer with doses so that whenever I see a new practitioner, I can simply print out my list of supplements and say “see attached” rather than trying to remember and cram everything onto two small lines on an application form. 

Chronic illness affects every aspect of a person’s life. Taking supplements becomes an integral part of life, one that can often seem like a burden. Finding ways to make the process a little easier can help relieve some of the resentment one feels about needing assistance in order to be semi-functional.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Recently, the notification of the suicide by a patient with Lyme came across on a Lyme group I’m a member of. Unfortunately, this is not a rare occurrence. Lyme may not kill directly the way a disease like cancer does, but the hell it causes for the patients and their families makes suicide a common form of death for Lyme patients. Early in my battle with Lyme, I read this speech made by Joseph G. Jemsek, MD, FACP, AAHIVS made before the North Carolina Medical Board on July 20, 2006. It became deeply seared into my brain, and I have unfortunately found out firsthand how true it is:

I was in high school when HIV and AIDS were finally starting to be understood. One of my youth group leaders said to us at one point, “You kids don’t understand how big of a deal AIDS is going to be.” (We’ve all suspected that he died from AIDS-related cancer a few years after that, but for religious reasons, his true medical history was not given to the public.) AIDS was the most terrible disease anyone could imagine at that point. Yet only 20 years later with the rapid innovations in HIV treatment, a doctor who works with both HIV/AIDS and Lyme patients clearly states that the Lyme patients are the ones with the inferior quality of life.

Unfortunately, suicide is not uncommon among those with Lyme because the quality of life that Lyme and accompanying tick-borne diseases leave people with is so low. There are a variety of reasons that can lead to patients taking their own lives. First and foremost, Lyme causes horrible physical pain that leaves them living in a hellish existence. Many have difficulties finding doctors to prescribe adequate pain relief as they’re seen as drug seekers and/or because of restrictions due to the “war on drugs.” For many pain doctors who don’t understand late disseminated or chronic Lyme disease, they can’t tell nor do they believe how bad the pain really is.

Getting treatment for Lyme disease itself is also difficult due to medical politics around Lyme disease. The nearest medical practitioner to Austin who openly treats Lyme is in a suburb outside Dallas; the second nearest doctor is in Louisiana and is over a six hour drive away. (There are others who practice covertly within Texas, but one won't find them on an internet search.) When I was first diagnosed with Lyme, my chemical sensitivities were too severe for me to be able to travel out of Austin to find treatment which greatly limited my options. For others, their difficult financial situations prevent travel and seeing doctors who are out-of-network. Many years ago, there was a nurse practitioner who used to openly treat Lyme in Austin, but she now practices in Washington, D.C. due to Texas Medical Board politics. Both the doctors who treat Lyme and the patients with Lyme suffer greatly due to these political issues when treatment is difficult to administer and receive.

The fatigue that accompanies Lyme is debilitating for many. At the worst of the illness, I wanted to end my marriage, but I could not because I literally could not take care of myself. I required a caregiver to buy me food and prepare it for me quite often. I couldn’t drive myself to the doctor. I couldn’t walk to the mailbox to get my Netflix discs (before the days of streaming) to keep me entertained. If I’d left my husband, I would have lost custody of my children because I couldn't have taken care of them in any meaningful way. Without my children, I would have lost everything that was important to me at that point and I would have had no reason to keep living.

Many Lyme patients are put on drug such as antipsychotics and antidepressants which carry suicide risk warnings. When I first began having severe Lyme related symptoms, my caring but misguided primary care provider decided I was suffering from postpartum depression and tried to convince me I needed an antidepressant. That is a fairly typical for most people who are dealing with the overwhelming symptoms of Lyme: Their doctors decide that this bizarre and long list of symptoms they are reporting must all be in their heads. Rather than pursuing testing and realistic solutions, the patients are put on drugs that have a potential to do more harm than good. The antidepressant that most doctors chose as a first line of defense is one that subsequent genetic testing has shown that my body cannot detoxify. Thus, taking that drug could have made me very ill or even suicidal.

Lyme can also cause mineral imbalances that cause emotional instability: I've experienced this personally when a sudden zinc deficiency cause a severe round of depression and crying. Imbalances in brain chemistry can happen with Lyme patients as well. Unfortunately, most practitioners aren't looking to find these simple-to-treat causes of depression and so patients don’t get the supplements they need to remain stable. 

Likewise, the extreme lack of quality sleep that can accompany Lyme disease can lead to suicidal thoughts. During the worst years of the Lyme battle, I was only getting one hour stretches of sleep even though I was sleeping 12-16 hours a day. Continuous sleep deprivation can destroy one’s body and mind, creating all kinds of dysfunction. There's a good reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.

Soon after I was diagnosed with Lyme, a friend with Lyme warned me of a severe depression that can accompany Lyme dying off. Another patient with Lyme also talked to me about it at a later date. The toxins released during a Lyme die off create a depression which makes the entire universe seem blacker than black. It is dark and awful; it defies description in ways that are unspeakable because of how horrid it is. It in no way resembles situational depression or minor depression that most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. During the Lyme induced depression, nothing in one's thoughts is accurate. I always knew that the hellish blackness would only last 48-72 hours, but there were times when I wasn't sure I would be able to make it through those few days of complete darkness.

It's not uncommon for friends and family to disappear into the woodwork over the course of a patient's Lyme struggles. When I first began having symptoms and had no diagnosis, many of my friends and family members didn't understand. Some did things that were physically harmful to me even though my ex-husband and I asked them to stop: They thought my chemical sensitivities were just delusions. Others thought the whole thing was delusional because surely no one could have as many symptoms as I was having and still have a normal CBC. They also falsely assumed that doctors can easily diagnose everything in this modern day. One of the default responses of people is that when they don't know what to do or don't know how to cope, they abandon the person in need. This happens all too often to Lyme patients who after years of suffering find themselves down to only a core group of friends who really care, and in some cases, they might not even have that.

Financial ruin is not unusual for those with late disseminated Lyme disease. I was blessed to be married to a man who earns a very successful salary. He was able to keep supporting me when I was no longer contributing to the family economy. His job provided decent health insurance, and while it doesn’t cover anywhere near half of my medical expenses, it does still pay on some of them. I applied for and upon appeal received SSDI, but the cost of my Lyme-related treatment has been over twice what I receive from SSDI in most years, and that doesn't even include needing money to pay a mortgage or eating or any of those other pesky living experiences. Were it not for my ex-husband, I would not have been able to afford the treatments that got me well. Healthcare and wellness are still a privilege of the wealthy in this nation, not a universal right.

When watching an ILADS conference video a few years, one of the keynote speakers, a doctor who was one of the best known in the field, told those attending something similar to the following: “If your patients didn’t have PTSD before they got Lyme, they will have it by the time they reach your office. They will have spent years and thousands of dollars going to doctors who don’t believe them and who can’t help them despite the fact that they have very real health problems.” The emotional distress of PTSD from health-related problems cannot be undervalued: It alone is enough to cause depression and suicidal idealization. This doesn't have to be, though, and it shouldn't be. If doctors were educated on Lyme treatment and insurance companies were willing to pay for it, the quality of the lives of patients with Lyme would increase rapidly. Instead, however, many Lyme patients are left broken, broke, and alone at the end of their battle. Is it any wonder that they choose suicide over a life of continuing struggle and pain?

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

On many occasions, I have half-jokingly told people, “If you get a major disease, don’t get one that’s a political controversy. Get one that is well understood by science and that is supported by society.”  In other words, don’t get Lyme disease!

The reasons that Lyme is such a political disease are long and multi-fold. This blog post is only meant to summarize some of the highlights so that people can have a basic understanding of why getting treatment for Lyme disease, especially late disseminated Lyme disease, can be so difficult. This post certainly does not represent all of the issues with the politics of Lyme, but it summarizes some of the highlights.

The official agency which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about Lyme disease is the IDSA, the Infectious Diseases Society of America. From reports that I have read on the internet, the IDSA is the typical old boys’ club: Interested in sustaining its own interests, but not truly concerned with helping others. The majority of those on the panel that makes recommendations for Lyme treatment do not actually treat Lyme patients, nor are they willing to listen to those doctors who do. The group refuses to believe that chronic Lyme exists, instead insisting it is “just” post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. The Connecticut Attorney General’s office has led an investigation of the IDSA which concluded that the IDSA is a very challenged organization. Seven of the panel members who advise the CDC about Lyme policies and research have conflicts of interest in terms of financial holdings and Lyme; it was these anti-trust allegations that led to the Attorney General's investigation in the first place.

The IDSA continues to endorse the two-tiered ELISA and Western blot Lyme tests for Lyme testing, possibly due to financial ties and connections. This is the inaccurate testing which resulted in my misdiagnosis of not having Lyme in 1994; since then it has become common knowledge that this testing has a 50% or higher false negative rate. That is an abysmal result rate for test accuracy, and no one doing statistics would consider it a valid result at all. However, because of the various interests of the IDSA board members, they continue to endorse this test and recommend it to the CDC.

The IDSA’s “competition” is ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. Their board members are scientists and doctors who treat patients or otherwise work with late disseminated Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. They recognize from experience that the four week course of doxycycline recommended by the IDSA is inadequate to treat Lyme disease which has not been detected within a short amount of time after the bite. ILADS also promotes research and education for physicians and researchers on Lyme and related diseases.

Despite the scientific research and experience of ILADS, the CDC continues to deny that late disseminated Lyme disease even exists. LymeDisease.org recently administered a 10 day online survey on Lyme Disease to provide information for the ISDA and other confused practitioners; 6100 people who have Lyme or are caregivers for someone with Lyme responded to this survey including me. The resulting publication is amazing as it clearly demonstrates the devastating effects that late disseminated Lyme disease has on people even if the IDSA and CDC don’t want to believe this condition exists.

To further complicate the issues of Lyme disease, the CDC’s treatment policy makes it difficult for patients to get adequate treatment. Because only four weeks of antibiotic treatment is recommended for a tick bite, the vast majority of physicians are unaware of how inadequate this treatment is for most patients who have late disseminated Lyme. The doctors then refuse to provide any other treatment that steps out of line with the CDC’s treatment protocol. As a result, many patients can’t find a doctor to treat them: The doctor who made my original Lyme Disease diagnosis in 2009 using IGeneX testing refused to treat me according to ILADS protocols because he was afraid of being reported to the state medical board for practicing experimental medicine.

The threat of losing one’s medical license is a very real problem for Lyme practitioners. Because of the IDSA’s control over the CDC, the physicians who are willing to prescribe extended antibiotic regiments for face censure by their state licensing boards for not following standard protocol. This was a huge problem until recently in many states. The Connecticut legislature began the process of supporting physicians who follow ILADS and other experimental guidelines in 2009 with a law allowing doctors to treat late disseminated Lyme Disease with extended antibiotics. This began the process of similar legislation being passed in other states; many have Lyme laws up for consideration this year. Texas followed suit in 2011 after a long campaign by many devoted Lyme activists and sponsorship of the bill by a state senator who had suffered from Lyme himself and had experienced difficulty getting appropriate treatment. The Texas law forbids the punishment of medical practitioners treating Lyme with extended courses of antibitotics if they have completed adequate continuing education courses about Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases. This has relieved the fears of some medical practitioners in Texas, and it allowed one previously censured Texas doctor to reopen his Lyme treatment practice. However, other Lyme practitioners had already been driven from the state and continue to practice elsewhere.

In addition, many insurance companies are unwilling to pay for the extended treatment recommended by ILADS affiliated physicians. Despite studies and experience, the insurance companies cite the CDC’s policy and deem all other treatment experimental and therefore refuse to cover it. This leaves patients in a terrible place: Needing extensive treatment but having access to coverage for no more than four weeks of antibiotics. I have heard stories of Americans flying to Russia for treatment because it is cheaper than trying to get treatment in the US without adequate insurance coverage.

Furthermore, the insurance companies will file complaints against doctors who practice under ILADS guidelines in an attempt to avoid paying patients’ treatment bills. If the insurance companies shut down the doctors’ practices, it short-circuits their problems with having to pay for treatment. The Texas Medical Board used to allow anonymous complaints which encouraged this type of practice not only for Lyme doctors but for many others as well. As a result, because many insurance companies value profit over human lives and/or quality of life, they attempt to prevent treatment in any way that will save them money. It’s a truly unethical position in my opinion.

These issues are just the tip of the iceberg for the wider societal problems Lyme Disease patients face. Various researchers continue to demonstrate that ILADS’ policies on Lyme treatment are closer to the truth than the IDSA’s. However, the need to be right and rich overshadows the desire to help patients in most cases. The political battle for access to adequate treatment for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases continues while many people live their lives crippled by pain and misery.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God. ~Helen Keller 

One of the ironies of human life is that some of the most painful things we experience end up being incredible blessings in the long run if we can look at them through the right lens. For me, Lyme has been one of those bitter blessings. Enduring the struggles of late disseminated Lyme disease has been one of the hardest challenges of my life, far worse in ways than going through a divorce, earning a Ph.D. or even having a child die unexpectedly from natural causes. I have been through a very difficult twelve year war with Lyme that has involved being bedbound, homebound, misunderstood, and in hellish physical pain. Yet despite the misery that I have endured because of Lyme, I see it as having been a catalyst for many other incredible blessings in my life.

The stress that Lyme placed on my former less-than-healthy marriage was what dealt the final death blows to the relationship. However, without the influence of the Lyme, I probably would have stayed in a marriage that was less than satisfactory because I was blinded from the reality I was living in. Lyme helped clarify how dysfunctional and unsupportive of a relationship it was and how the relationship wasn't built to sustain those vows of “in sickness and in health.” While the end of the marriage was deeply painful, I am far happier since I separated from my ex-husband than I was in most of the relationship with him. I am very grateful to be able to say that I am happily divorced.

Because I was so sick with Lyme, I was bedbound for the better part of two years and homebound for six. The isolation resulting from the illness has been a huge part of my growth.  As Shakti Gawain writes in Living in the Light:

For me, the severity of the illness I endured forced me to have this time of isolation when I could grow without the overwhelming influence of the external world. While I still had access via the internet, I also spent a great deal of time in silence, and that was crucial to my healing. Now that I have been able to regain health, I am challenged to take my acquired knowledge into the world to help others.

Lyme has also forced me to me evolve spiritually. I would never have walked down the path I am now on if it hadn’t become a vital component for me to regain my health. I would have continued to spend my life, as I did in many previous lives, denying my metaphysical gifts out of fear of rejection and ridicule by those around me and in our society at large. Yet when accepting and using these gifts allowed me to heal when all else had failed, suddenly it no longer mattered what anyone else thought. I needed to be me, and I needed to help others to heal and be themselves, too.

Like any major illness, enduring Lyme for so long showed me what truly matters. I no longer take for granted things like going to the grocery store. I view it as a privilege, not a task. I no longer have an overwhelming need for material objects in my life; whenever I have a burst of health, I tend to use it to clean and purge as I’m still digging my way out from 12 years of accumulated clutter (partially due to living with a packrat and partially due to my inability to do anything besides the basics when I was so sick). I was never an incredibly materialistic person, but now, I’m even less so. Those things that used to bring me happiness no longer seem relevant.

I have also discovered who my true friends and family are. I believe strongly that family is the group of people you turn to both when you want to celebrate and when you want to cry. For many of us, those people aren’t our biological relatives. We create family where we can find it. We adopt families who accept us and love us exactly as we are. I definitely believe this is true for me. I have lost many friends along the way of my journey with Lyme, but I have also gained some new ones who are more amazing than I could have previously imagined.

So does this post mean that you should tell people who are going through some terrible trials that they are blessings in disguise? Absolutely not, unless you want to lose friends or risk life and limb with their reactions! Not everyone is in a space to be able to understand that their trials may eventually turn into blessings. Instead, the best response to people who are undergoing difficult times is simply to tell them that you’re happy to help them in whatever way would best serve them. Until they reach the point that time has helped heal their wounds and allows them to see what they have gained through their pain, the best thing to do is acknowledge their pain and offer loving compassion.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Everyone knows that when you exercise, you might feel tired initially, but all those endorphins you get pumping through your body will help you feel better in the long run. Soon exercising will increase your energy. Right? Wrong! This may be true for the majority of the population, but for those fighting chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis and systemic exertion intolerance disease) or Lyme disease,* the exact opposite may be true. Exercise has the potential to make these groups of people VERY sick for several days after they attempt to exercise.

This negative response of the body to exercise in the CFS population is known as post-exertional malaise (PEM). Studies have shown that PEM is not an exercise phobia: It is a physical response in those with CFS that does not exist in the healthy but sedentary control populations. While there are contradictory studies regarding fatigue related to CFS, they are problematic in their methodology because they aren’t evaluating patients the day after the testing to follow through: A study by Keller et al has demonstrated how the contradictory studies that aren’t evaluating the correct information on people with CFS and exercise impairment may overestimate the patients’ functionality by 50%. Thus, some patients with CFS can do well on a cardio test, but the next day, they won’t be able to move. Another study by Van Ness et al showed that 85% of the general control population had recovered from testing exercise 24 hours later, but ZERO percent of the CFS population had. That’s a huge difference in the world of statistical validity.

In addition, these studies that have patients doing 15+ minutes of cardio exercise are studies on the best coping patients in the CFS population. These are the people who complain that their CFS limits them to less than eight hours of activity a day as opposed to the people who, like I was previous for two years, are bedbound and unable to do more than take a shower and sit up for an hour daily. The worst of the worst in the CFS population are too sick to even consider participating in studies like these! They are the people who are counting their spoons very carefully, and they can’t spare energy for anything beyond basic bodily needs.

PEM is a hallmark of mitochondrial dysfunction for those in the CFS population. Dr. Amy Myhill was one of the first to develop a protocol to address the role of mitochondria in CFS, a protocol I tried in 2007 or so with limited success. As Myhill describes it:

In short, this means that the body’s batteries can’t get enough juice to power the rest of the body. If your batteries can’t recharge quickly and efficiently, then your ability to function is impaired. Anyone who has had a slow-to-charge cell phone or a laptop battery which couldn't hold a charge for long can get a rough impression of what is going on in a body with mitochondrial dysfunction. It becomes very frustrating and very limiting very quickly.

So how do those with PEM rectify this issue? Aside from protocols like the Myhill one, the best advice is to limit one’s activity on any given day to what one can tolerate. As Myhill phrases it, “Pace - do not use up energy faster than your mitos can supply it.” It’s a simple formula of supply and demand that also involves intuition and listening to one’s body. It also means understanding that while you may be able to walk a mile one day, for the next week you might not be able to walk 50 feet, and then in another week you can walk two miles. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster. I have learned the very hard way that when I start feeling certain pains in my body, I've overdone it, draining my mitochondria almost to their limits, and I need to stop whatever I’m doing immediately or the fallout will be terrible. Pushing myself to expand my limits, like I would have done with exercise when I was healthy, will only have terrible consequences. Thus, when my body says stop, I do it or I pay a very heavy price: I will experience what I call a crash or what many people would call a relapse. This crash will involve extreme fatigue that prevents me from doing anything but laying perfectly still on a horizontal surface while trying to endure the accompanying pain. It’s just not worth having to pay for an activity on the ensuing days. In previous years, my fallout rate would involve days or weeks of being crashed. Since beginning Lyme treatment, instead of paying for days or weeks, the fallout usually lasts no more than 24 hours, but it’s still too high of a price to pay for just a little more physical activity. I still have to strictly obey my body’s limits.

The issue of PEM contributed to the dysfunction in my previous marriage. My ex-husband was the one who had to take over when I crashed, intensely caring both for me and our young children instead of just caring for the children most of the time. Thus, he became incredibly fearful of my crashes and tried to limit my activity. He would tell me, “You can’t do that,” as a statement of fear-based control rather than love-based concern. He could not believe that I could discern when my body was going to crash once I learned to listen to it. Instead, he tried to hold me back from functioning at all rather than having to deal with the aftermath of the crash. While his concerns were understandable, the result was that it was miserable to try and do anything remotely social with him such as a walk in the park on one of my good days because he spent the entire time worrying about what the future might hold rather than enjoying the present moment. Even before we separated, I began avoiding activities with him for this very reason: I didn't want someone along who was going to make the activity miserable and anxiety filled, even if he was doing it from a justifiable place.

Researchers have recognized that post-exertional malaise is so conclusive of a symptom of CFS that it can be used to validly differentiate between the healthy and the CFS populations. However, that acceptance of PEM has not trickled down to most health practitioners or the general population. Most people still blindly believe that exercise is the cure for all that ails you. While exercise has been proven to help those with depression and a wide assortment of other health issues, those with CFS need to be very careful in how they use their limited energy in order not to cause further suffering. If you know people with CFS, please understand that they are not being obstinate or lazy in refusing to push their limits. Rather, they are protecting their own well-being by doing what their bodies tell them is best and that research has supported.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

*I suspect a very large portion of the patients with CFS actually have late disseminated Lyme disease but have not been tested using the proper procedures. This was the case for me as I lived under a CFS diagnosis for six years before being diagnosed with Lyme. CFS and fibromyalgia remain my legal diagnoses because the CDC does not recognize late disseminated Lyme disease.

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

May all who are sick and ill
Quickly be freed from their illness,
And may every disease in the world
Never occur again.
As long as space endures,
As long as there are being to be found,
May I continue likewise to remain
To soothe the sufferings of those who live.
~The Dalai Lama

For many people, pain is pain. They have been blessed never to experience the amazingly wide variety of pain that the human body can endure. In the case of many women, natural childbirth or recovering from a c-section is their gauge of the highest level of pain they can imagine. For men, there isn't quite the same standard of comparison. I have heard many people of different sexes say that passing kidney stones was the worst pain of their life; for others, the pain of shingles is the ultimate misery.  Having endured shingles in my neck and having successfully completed natural childbirth many times, I would say that shingles were worse than my second and third labors for the births of my second thru fourth children. My first labor and birth, however, were far worse than any of them.

Yet when it comes to late disseminated Lyme disease, the levels of pain I have experienced are nowhere near the levels of pain in these other comparisons. In part, that is due to the unrelenting nature of Lyme pain. Childbirth labor will end within 24-48 hours in our modern culture. C-section recovery time is 2-6 weeks in many cases. But for Lyme, there is no definite time table. It just goes on and on. I tell many people that if I were able to put their spirits into my body, they would immediately pass out from the level of constant and unrelenting physical pain I live with. I have built up a tolerance to the pain, and I have learned how to function somewhat well with it. Most people, though, simply don’t have that tolerance. Yet no matter how long I have lived with it, the pain is still miserable. It doesn't make it any better just because you’re used to it. 

Despite the fact that I am a holistic life coach and intuitive energy healer who focuses on helping others heal through natural solutions, I frequently have people tell me how they cured their non-Lyme pain naturally. Based on their limited experience, they feel I should be doing what they did and I will magically be healed. They talk about how turmeric did amazing things for their pain or how other natural anti-inflammatories were miracle workers. However, that level of relief is not appropriate for Lyme pain. A comparable comparison would be like telling someone with a compound bone fracture that s/he/ze should just put a bandage on it, and everything will feel so much better. In that case, the person needs a skilled surgeon or doctor to put his/her/hir bone back into the body, to seal the broken skin, to apply a cast of some sort, and to monitor for infection or complications. The situation is far too complicated to just use a bandage. Likewise, no one in their right minds would tell women who are in labor or just had c-sections that the only methods of pain relief they should use is turmeric. Even if a woman is attempting natural childbirth, she will be using other pain relief techniques such as walking, acupressure, hypnosis, meditation, breathing, massage, and more in order to manage the pain of labor.

That’s not to say that natural pain relief methods aren't helpful. I do take fish oil, a natural anti-inflammatory, and get some relief from it. I’m pretty sure that if one sliced open my veins, they would be dyed the beautiful yellow-orange color of turmeric from how much I have taken it over the years. I use other herbal formulas to help lessen the pain by addressing other issues besides inflammation that cause pain for me. Yet alone, the natural methods are like putting a shovelful of dirt into a grave: It’s nowhere enough to fill the hole. Even in combination, these methods can’t get the pit even half full.

Why is Lyme pain so bad? That’s a million dollar question, and the researcher who is able to understand and cure it will win a special place in heaven if I had anything to do with it!  Lyme creates pain on many different levels: On any given day, I am dealing with muscle, bone, joint, ligament, organ, and neural pain. Each feels very different, and each requires different approaches for relief. But why is there all of this pain, especially when one is going through treatment for Lyme? The best analogy is a comparison to a bee sting.  When a bee stings a human, it releases a toxic venom into the human’s body which makes the human miserable, fatally so in cases of extreme allergy. In other cases, the bee toxin “just” creates severe inflammation, itching and pain. Regardless, it’s a successful evolutionary method of teaching predators like humans to stay away from bees lest they have to face the consequences of a sting.

Likewise, Lyme has evolved into an amazingly sophisticated bacteria, far moreso than most bacteria we are used to dealing with. The way it adapts and impairs the human body is mind-boggling to me.  One of these protective features of the evolved Lyme bacteria is that when it dies, it releases toxins into the body of its human host causing extreme pain. The Lyme doesn't want to die; thus, it tries to make it difficult and undesirable for the human host to kill it.  Survival of the fittest reigns again. Many patients who have fought late disseminated Lyme will tell you that the cure is almost worse than the disease when it comes to Lyme because of the extreme pain that happens during the process of Lyme die off, also known as a Herxheimer reaction or herxing.

So what can one do for Lyme pain? There’s a variety of approaches to take, and many people find they need more than one. Like I mentioned above, fish oil, turmeric, and other anti-inflammatories can be useful in contributing to the overall picture, but they will not be enough on their own for most people.  A strict diet is absolutely necessary: Sugar, refined foods, gluten, and other items can make the pain much, much worse. There are other herbs and natural substances that can also help bind to and absorb some of the toxins that the Lyme releases as it dies including chlorella and l-ornithine.  Because the buildup of these toxins in one’s system can create even more pain, it’s important to make sure that detoxification and elimination processes in the body are working well. This includes taking herbal and vitamin liver and kidney support, having frequent bowel movements, drinking lots of water and sweating such as in a FIR sauna. Massage, manual lymph drainage, chiropractic, and acupuncture as well as other bodywork modalities can also greatly facilitate the detoxification process.

The neuropathic pain I suffer from is also an indirect result of the Lyme die off. When many people are sick, their blood sugar levels will rise as part of the hormonal process that is helping them heal. When blood sugar levels get high enough for long enough, such as during a chronic illness, they can cause neuropathic pain that is hellish in ways that can’t be expressed in words. The burning and tingling sensation of my entire skin surface hurting is unlike any other; it makes me want to peel off all my skin with a potato peeler because that sounds less painful.

The obvious solution to this is to keep one’s blood sugar low through strict diet and herbs.  Despite devout adherence these methods, my body is stubbornly unwilling to lower my blood sugar levels; this is not uncommon among patients with Lyme. Since I am consistently short of being diabetic by lab testing because of a rigorous diet, my doctors cannot prescribe insulin to control my blood sugar; one of the other most popular blood sugar drugs for those who are pre-diabetic sent me into lactic acidosis, an uncommon but known side effect. (I’m not in the high risk group for it happening, either!) While I absolute detest medicating symptoms rather than dealing with the actual cause, the neuropathy I endure is one situation where the only realistic option has come down to medicating the symptom of pain rather than curing the actual problem in order to get through the pain of the battle in order to win the war. It’s a quandary because killing Lyme is raising my blood sugar, but in order to get rid of the Lyme to lower my blood sugar, we have to kill it. There’s no easy solution on this one. So in order to get me through the process of the Lyme dying, we have to mask the miserable side effects with drugs.

For someone who lives a very holistic life and does not partake in alcohol or recreational drugs, I am unbelievably grateful that there are western drugs to provide pain relief when all of the above is not enough. I have only met one person with severe late disseminated Lyme Disease who did not have to take narcotics at some point to get through the pain; it was a matter of principle for him and he chose to be in hellish pain rather than take the drugs. Most who have walked this path, though, will have no judgment of others who turn to high power drugs to help during the most painful parts of the journey.

I think many in the natural healing community, both patients and practitioners, forget that Western medicine does have a place of importance in our lives. While diet is crucial to successful management of diabetes, those who have diabetes, especially those with Type 1, rely on insulin to survive. Up until insulin was understood and used to help those with diabetes in the 1920s (winning a Nobel Prize), being diagnosed with diabetes was a death sentence. Likewise, I had a great aunt who died as a toddler early in the last century from “lockjaw” which we now know as tetanus. It’s a bacterial infection that can now be prevented through vaccination or in milder cases, treated with antibiotics after infection. These are health conditions that require Western intervention; most people don’t deny that.  What most people haven’t accepted is that late disseminated Lyme is a condition that also requires complicated treatments that involve both holistic and Western medicine.

Lyme pain is truly different than most other pain we experience as humans. It’s a pain that I hope that most people never have to endure. I also hope and pray that someday there will be better solutions for killing Lyme without creating so much pain as part of the cure.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Health issues go through popular fads just like foods do. The latest food cure-all at one point was açai; goji berries got prime billing for some time, too. Kale and chia have been the health food darlings for a while now, so it’s about time for a new “miracle” food to be marketed. With regards to healing trends, vitamin D deficiency was all the rage for several years. It truly exists, and solving it helps many people. However, just because it gives some people relief doesn't necessarily mean it is the root of the problem. It’s often just a symptom of other larger issue.  

The most recent health “fad” that I've seen in this regard is the MTHFR genetic defect.  There are actually multiple genes that relate to this detoxification process, and I have two of the most common defects involved. I can’t tell you how many people have approached me absolutely certain that they've discovered the root cause of my health issues and how I would be miraculously better just by switching my B vitamins.  This is not news to me, and no, it was not a miracle cure.  It actually didn't make any impact at all upon my health in the grand perspective of things.

Any good holistic professional will already be aware of MTHFR defects, and most will be able to recommend B vitamins that are in the correct form for those who have MTHFR defects. In my case, we actually didn't do the genetic testing until about a year ago; we just correctly presumed based on my symptoms that I had the defects and treated me appropriately. The only reason we ran the tests when we did was because they were included in another genetic profile that my pain specialist wanted to run.

While many people believe that MTHFR defects are the cause of health problems, I believe they are often a symptom of a larger issue. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is an epigenetic situation: Until an insult to the body occurs, the methylation problems don’t manifest for many individuals. In my case, it was Lyme disease that activated the problematic genes and left me with major detoxification issues.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(spoiler alert and trigger alert regarding the death of a child)

My kids and I continue to work our way through Star Trek: The Next Generation. We’re now watching season 7. In episode 7, Counselor Deanna Troi’s mother Lwaxana Troi is aboard the Enterprise as a diplomat assisting with communications with a telepathic race. In the process of working with this new species, Lwaxana begins to have debilitating fatigue and headaches. The medical doctors and others on the crew suspect that her overuse of her telepathic abilities with this new species has drained her. Eventually, Lwaxana collapses and enters what we would describe as a coma.

However, the truth about Lwaxana’s collapse was far more dastardly than just exhaustion. One of the members of the telepathic species, Maques, believes that there is a part of Lwaxana’s mind that she has shut down. As Deanna and Commander Will Riker investigate the past to see what Lwaxana might be repressing, they find a great number of missing years in Lwaxana’s journals, supporting Maques’ theory that there is something major that Lwaxana is hiding. Eventually through a mind meld of sorts, Deanna is able to help her mother’s subconscious process the truth about a situation that was so painful that she’d had to deeply repress it until it festered and caused her body to collapse. The trauma involved was that Lwaxana’s oldest daughter Kestra (Deanna’s older sister whom she’d never previously known about) died in a tragic accident when Deanna was only a baby.  Lwaxana blamed herself for the death of her elder daughter. The pain of losing her child was so excruciating that Lwaxana tried to block it all out so that she could avoid and forget the pain.  Eventually that mental and emotional pain caught up with her and shut down her body.

This isn't science fiction. While the details of the case are very much fictional, the reality of how the body, mind and spirit interact is true.  It is entirely possible for us to store our pain in our mind and our body eventually leading to our body’s collapse. For most of us this process doesn't result in a spontaneous coma. Instead, we have unexplained back pain, fibromyalgia, the flu or cancer among many other health issues. I am in no way denying that all of these conditions have physical, biological roots as well. The flu, for instance, is a virus. However, why is it that with two people in the same family with the same diet one might get the flu every year while the other never gets sick? Clearly genetics may play a role, but stress and other life experiences also condition our bodies to be predisposed to illness or health.

As someone who has experienced the unexpected and tragic death of a child, I know firsthand that it is something that is so traumatic that it could eventually destroy our health if we do not thoroughly process our grief about the situation. The pain that a child dying causes is unlike any other pain in the world.  It’s excruciating. Every day the bereaved parents wake up to feeling that part of their future has been stolen from them. Their empty arms may literally ache from the absence of their child, and they almost certainly will feel the pain of heartache in their chests. In my case, it took thirteen years of work in order to fully process the pain that came from my daughter’s death, in part because I thought I had already processed it all. I didn't realize that there were subconscious memories stored in my body that I still needed to release. Once I finally released those traumatic emotions, I finally found true peace around my daughter’s death.

When we face health challenges, it is important that we work not just to eliminate the pathogens or the pain but that we also relieve and release the emotional pain that is often behind our poor health. This is not always something straightforward and easy. It sometimes takes time to find the roots of our pain or illness and work through them. This process is entirely possible, but oftentimes it requires the assistance of a professional such as me to clarify the issues behind the problems. Lwaxana needed the assistance of Maques and Deanna to go into her mind and find her issues. While I definitely can’t meld with anyone’s mind, I can speak with higher powers who help me find issues stored within the bodies of clients so that they can release whatever is making them ill. I've gone through this process myself; it is what helped me to regain my health after many medical professionals had given up on me. Working with the mind-body-spirit connection can provide incredible healing for us in the real world just as it did for Lwaxana Troi in the fiction of the 24th century.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(I received a complimentary copy of this work from Hay House via NetGalley.  The opinions here are my own and are not influenced by anyone.)

I’m a fan of many of the Hay House authors, so seeing that publishing house associated with a new book induces me to try an author I might not have read otherwise.  In most cases, I’m pleased with the selections I read from Hay House.  This was not one of those cases.

In Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased, Jamie Turndorf, Ph.D., explores her newfound connection to the spirit world after the death of her husband, former Jesuit priest Emile Jean Pin.  As a former atheist, this new world of spirituality is an adventure for Turndorf, one she approaches with the blind enthusiasm of a young child after she conquers her initial misgivings.  After her husband’s unexpected death from a reaction to a bee string, Turndorf is surprised to discover her connection to her beloved Jean continues through their deep spiritual love for each other.  She writes that together they have a ministry to help others in processing death and connecting to those in the afterlife so that all involved may continue to grow and heal.

Love Never Dies does have a few good qualities.  It is simply written making it accessible to the popular masses.  The book also has the potential to comfort many in the first and last sections where Turndorf describes her experiences and the experiences of her clients as they reconnect with their deceased love ones.  The book brings up an incredibly large number of questions for a book group to discuss around life, love, healing and death.

From there, however, the book simply falls apart.  It’s repetitive and poorly edited starting with the weak rhyming poetry at the beginning of each chapter.  Turndorf proudly declares that she hadn’t checked out the “competition” before writing her book making it an all original work.  While there are merits to an untainted narrative, those merits are outweighed by the negatives in this book.  Turndorf’s lack of vocabulary to discuss concepts such as synchronicity weakens her arguments and presentation immensely.  The result is a book that feels like an amateur falsely pretending to be a professional.

Turndorf also is blinded by her own narrow experiences regarding the metaphysical world.  She only sees what she wants to see and doesn’t consider that there are possibilities beyond the definitive answers she purports to reach.  For example, Turndorf declares that demons or negative spirit entities might exist though she’s doubtful about it.  She thinks that if negative spiritual beings do exist, Jean protects her from them always.  Any experienced psychic, intuitive or medium who has worked extensively with the metaphysical will cringe at this naïve view:  In his Hay House publication Infinite Quest: Develop Your Psychic Intuition to Take Charge of Your Life, John Edward speaks extensively on the importance of spiritual protection when one is working with the other side.  Turndorf’s inexperience becomes dangerous as she guides readers into murky waters without life jackets.

Furthermore, Turndorf blindly believes that all the departed are willing to work on their faults and help their living loved ones heal.  This, too, is a declaration of an inexperienced practitioner who is, in my words, blinded by the white light.  Other gifted mediums such as me are able to encounter spirits in all their essence, seeing their soul level faults which do not miraculously heal upon entry to the afterlife.  Many souls choose not to work on their own healing in the afterlife, no differently than their course here on earth.  In those cases, Turndorf’s advice risks connecting hurting individuals with souls who will continue to emotionally and spiritual abuse them from the other side.  This is not only ignorant, but it’s dangerous and is the last thing a psychologist should want for clients.

Even on a much simpler and less dangerous level, Turndoff offers bad advice to those wanting to begin meditation as a means to connecting with departed souls.  Setting up beginners with the task of meditating for many hours is going to defeat many people before they even get out of the starting gate.  It’s far better for beginners to slowly introduce themselves to meditation to reduce the risk of perceived failure and to encourage successful future experiences which may eventually be longer.

Turndorf’s faulty logic is so convoluted at times that it is difficult to follow.  Throughout Love Never Dies, she contradicts herself on larger philosophical issues.  Turndorf presents the concept that things that happen more than three times are a scientifically valid result. Unfortunately, she fails to recognize that even if something occurs three times, it’s still possible to misinterpret information about those results.  Throughout the book, I feel she often misinterprets her experiences because of her lack of experience and narrow-minded views.  For example, Turndorf declares many times that we avoid loving fully because losing a loved one is so painful.  However, there are other possibilities for why we might restrain our love that she never even considers.  It’s possible that we don’t love fully because we don’t know how to.  It’s also possible that we don’t love fully because we don’t believe we deserve love.

This narrow perspective continues as Turndorf obsesses over her theories that she is metaphysically gifted because of her premature birth and three month NICU stay away from her mother.  She writes about high fevers and illness predisposing people to being able to being open to spiritual contact, yet she fails to examine the role of her own experiences with Lyme Disease in regards to her metaphysical experiences.  As a practitioner who has had Lyme and who works with many others who have Lyme, I would argue that the vast majority of people who deal with chronic or late disseminated Lyme Disease are those who are metaphysically gifted.  A little research outside of her own bubble would help Turndorf to see these other possibilities. 

As the book progresses, I found Turndorf’s words to her clients and to her readers to be cruel and potentially damaging.  I cringed as Turndorf relates how she said to a newly bereaved parent that “she could view this recent loss as a gift from the spirit.”  While this lesson is true on some levels, the way she phrased this to a parent who has recently lost a baby is heartless at best. 

Furthermore, comparing our pain to others’ is not beneficial.  Telling ourselves “it could be worse” demeans the pain we are experiencing.  Turndorf writes, “When we see someone in pain, we’re being invited to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and give thanks for the problems we have that pale in comparison.  Another person’s difficulty reminds us that we could have it so much worse.”  What she fails to contemplate is that some of her readers (including me in my not so distant past) will fall into that category of having things “so much worse.”  Having been told many times by others that they could look at my life and realize how good they actually have it, I can speak from experience that such an attitude does not help the person undergoing the trials.  The heartless response simply makes their pain increase.

If all of these issues aren’t enough, I found Turndorf’s basic psychological advice to be weak at best.  After 30 years’ experience in practice, she is not a novice.  She earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from California Coast University in 1994.  She is a nationally known psychologist using the pseudonym “Dr. Love.”  However, her personal relationship with Jean raised many flags for me as a reader and life coach, beginning with the fact that she was 21 and he was 58 when it began.  Turndorf claims that she and Jean had a perfect spiritual love, yet the aspects of their relationship she shares demonstrate a couple that struggled to love each other in their earthly forms.  She asserts that Jean was “one of the world’s true mystics” but he didn’t know he could be so close to her in spirit form.  This doesn’t build his credibility or hers.  Even Googling her late husband (who died in 2006, after the advent of the internet) does not turn up the abundance of hits one would expect from a man whom she claims was a one of the 50 most holy people to have lived in the eyes of the Dalai Lama.  As she describes their relationship after he “left his body,” Turndorf sees her late husband’s love as fulfilling her and becoming her own love.  Almost all psychologists would argue that seeking to use another’s love as a replacement for self-love is not a healthy approach in the long term.

Finally, in one of the experiences at the end of the book, she details of a client named “Mo.”  Turndorf uses guilt to trick Mo into working with her deceased husband.  This woman clearly has spent a lifetime being manipulated by others who prey on her overactive sense of guilt.  A healthier treatment option might have been to work with Mo to recognize her issues around guilt until she regained the self-esteem necessary to work on herself out of self-love.  The ends did not justify the means in this treatment.

Turndorf seems to think grieving is the only reason people need to connect to Spirit and those on the other side.  As she presents the issues in Love Never Dies, she fails to see how other tragedies can be more devastating and more impactful that grief.  Her narrow-minded and uneducated views result in a book that will help facilitate discussion about important topics but which ultimately may give some very bad advice to vulnerable readers.

(Attached below is a PDF of questions that could be used for book group discussions.  Feel free to alter or edit these questions for your own personal use in a group discussion or journaling.)

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In many articles about decluttering and minimizing, one of the popular suggestions is that if you haven’t worn a piece of clothing in over a year, you should purge it.  However, in my life, I have found this to be very bad advice.  While I agree that generally we as modern Americans have way too much crap around our houses, having multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) changes the rules of the game.  Individuals with MCS learn how to selectively hoard things that may be of future use.

MCS is a condition that is technically known as Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance; that translates roughly into, “We don’t know why your body can’t handle the synthetic chemicals that most people can handle.”  For me, a combination of genetics and Lyme disease have made it so that my liver has a great deal of difficulty detoxing the multitude of synthetic chemicals in the modern world. 

For those with MCS, new products provide health challenges because of the chemical off-gassing they do.  Off-gassing is the releasing of volatile compounds into the air (and thereby into our lungs and bodies).  A common example most people are familiar with is paint:  Everyone knows what new paint often smells like. Those are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that you smell being released from the paint.  There is now no-VOC paint which is almost odorless, and it doesn’t have as many synthetic chemicals to release thereby making it more tolerable (sometimes) to those who are sensitive to typical paint.  It's not the smell that is the actual problem but the chemicals that are released:  Low odor paint can still be a huge problem for those with MCS because the low odor paint has masking chemicals added to cover up the more toxic smelling components of the other chemicals.

Many products that we buy release chemicals in the off-gassing process.  Vinyl or PVC is one of the nastier ones.  New cars are loaded with toxic synthetic chemicals (aka the new car smell).  Many finishes on furniture are created through synthetic chemicals.  So when a chemically sensitive person purchases most things, they must first off-gas the products in order to release as many of the synthetic chemicals as possible before trying to use the product near them.  If one doesn’t off-gas many new products, someone with MCS will likely get very ill from them.  It can take between days and years to off-gas products, and some things never truly off-gas completely.

Clothes are no exception to this:  The preservative “sizing” that manufacturers use in fabric is actually formaldehyde or similar chemicals which are extremely difficult for most with MCS to handle.  Likewise, there are chemicals used in dying the clothing, and there are chemicals used in processing the raw materials.  Some elastics have fragrances added to unsuccessfully cover the cheap rubber smell of them.  New clothing, unless it is incredibly well processed organic clothing, is toxic by default.  Washing the clothing eventually pulls out some of the chemicals, but how many washes it takes can vary widely by the clothing itself.  There are various tricks one can use to help accelerate the detoxification process for clothing such as using enzymes, vinegar, baking soda, hot water, and for non-red clothing, buttermilk soaks, but repeated washing in water and drying on hot in the dryer really is the best way to make new clothing safer for use.  I have to wash new clothing between eight and 20 times to make it possible for me to wear, and I have had some clothing that I’ve given up after 20 washes and passed it on to others who aren’t as chemically sensitive as me.

Buying used clothing is often not much of a help:  It can be even harder to get out fragrances and chemicals from petrochemical based detergents, fabric softeners and dryer sheets than it is to get the chemicals out of new clothing.  It makes me very sick to even try as those fragrances and chemicals release into the air of my home during washing, and so I gave up buying used clothing long ago even though secondhand clothing previously was my preferred way of shopping for both environmental and financial reasons.  I still will buy used clothing if it comes from another chemically sensitive person, but it's hard to find clothes that fit those standards!

One of the additional issues I’ve deal with in battling Lyme is massive weight fluctuation.  When I am doing well, I drop weight quickly and without effort.  However, when I am facing new health challenges, I gain weight equally easily and with no negative dietary changes.  Thus, I have clothes in my closet that range from size 8 to size 24.  I was settled comfortably into a size 16 for over a year until last March when suddenly I started dealing with pancreatic issues; my weight shot back up to a size 22 within a few months even with me eating less carbohydrates, no sugars, and no fruits.  It was (and is) utterly frustrating.  As we kill bartonella and eliminate parasites from my pancreas, my weight has worked its way back down to a size 18 and continues to slowly drop back off.

I had been just about ready to let go of my largest clothes in sizes 22 and 24 last spring when the sudden weight gain happened, and mercifully, I still had all my larger clothes waiting in storage buckets in my closet.  Had I not, I would have had to invest in all new clothing, plus I would have had to go through the hassle and expense of detoxing the new clothing.  Thus, for someone like me who deals with chemical sensitivities and fluctuating weight, holding onto clothing for more than a year makes a great deal of sense.

While I am working to minimize the amount of “stuff” in my house, my clothing collection is not something I am willing to purge.  For my life and for others like me, the advice of getting rid of clothing I haven’t worn in a year is well-intentioned but impractical.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

My dreams are generally not prophetic, though for some with metaphysical gifts, dreams can provide amazing insight about the future.  Visions during sleep can also be an incredibly powerful way of connecting with the other side.  I have had one sleeping contact with the other side that I know of in which two deceased relatives came to visit me, but that was an exception to my norm.  Generally my dreams are very clearly my unconscious trying to work out emotional issues and stresses from my past and present.  However, when I am fighting Lyme, Bartonella or have parasites dying, I tend to have awful nightmares.  In a recent round of die off, I was dealing with dreams about death.  Intuitive empath that I am, it doesn’t surprise me that when critters in me are dying, I would be dreaming about death, too.

In the first dream I had, I was dying of butt cheek cancer while in high school.  No, I doubt that’s a real cancer term, but it has to do with the fact that I was having a great deal of Lyme-induced IT band pain which was creating real life butt cheek pain.  My unconscious was dealing with that pain, too.  Despite the fact I had terminal cancer, I was headed to the mall with a high school friend to do research for our math homework by finding the prices we needed to complete word problems.  As disturbing as it was that I was doing my math homework while faced with imminent death, I can even understand where it came from:  My high school geometry teacher had commented on one of my Facebook blog posts earlier that day.

In the second death-related dream, a divorced friend of mine died from a sudden but expected death (such as a rapid onset/decline cancer).  In the dream, much of what I was observing was her ex-husband moving into the house she got in the divorce with his new girlfriend and how their two children were coping with it all.  In reality, this was my unconscious dealing with issues around my own ex-husband as much as her issues with her ex-husband.

In the third death-related dream in less than 24 hours, I was dreaming of Ebola.  We can all probably figure out how that was in my unconscious given the media bombardment about Ebola even if one is trying to avoid it for the most part.  In this dream, I was dying of Ebola which I had caught at my childhood elementary school where I was working as a nurse.  Even though I was happy about being a nurse, I was very emphatic to anyone who asked that I had been a teacher previously.  Here again my unconscious is still working through my change in life paths to become a healer rather than a teacher.  While I believe that much of what I do combines the two vocations, I do not ever see myself in a traditional classroom grading papers again.  I’m on a different journey now.

Dreams can be very revealing of your fears, your desires, and the areas you need to work on healing.  Keeping a dream journal where you record your dreams when you wake up can be quite illuminating. If you’ve never done it, you might want to put some kind of recording device (paper, pen, iPhone, laptop) on your nightstand and try it for a few weeks to see what you can learn about yourself.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

Each year around this time, many of my friends begin a “30 Days with a Grateful Heart” project that was started by one of the women in the group we all met through.  Through this exercise, these women post on Facebook or on their blogs almost every day in December about something they are grateful for.  In theory, I can see how this is a beautiful way to bring a positive spirit to a season that has been overly commercialized.  In reality, I used to spend the first week of December fighting anger, depression and frustration related to this project.  I was really bothered.  I couldn’t read most of the posts on the topic.  It took me a while to formulate my thoughts on the subject, and I eventually decided that it was something that others need to hear because my outlook is different.  I formulated this post which I originally posted on Facebook for friends several years ago; I've edited and updated it for this blog.  This post definitely isn’t meant as an attack on those who do the project.  Instead, it’s mean to give the perspective of someone who fights major health issues.

For me, living with chronic illness has changed gratitude from something that can be a project that is confined to one month a year.  Gratitude is something that I have to find every single day.  It is a survival skill.  It is what helps me endure the pain and suffering.  In order to keep myself motivated to keep fighting a seemingly uphill battle, I have to count my blessings daily.  I’m not fortunate enough to only focus on these things for a short time each year.  If I lose sight of the things I am grateful for, I will lose the will to keep going.

My health issues also led me to shift the things that I am grateful for.  To those who do gratitude projects at this time of year, please consider adding “health” towards the top of your list of blessings.  If you can go to the grocery store by yourself; if you can go for a walk in the park almost any day of the year; if you can go to your children’s school pageants; if you can attend weddings and funerals; if you can go out with friends to a happy hour; if you can travel near and far; and if your lack of health does not limit the way you live your life, then you are truly blessed in a way that you don’t realize until you lose all of those things.

In the spirit of gratitude, I am going to share my list of things that I am grateful for.  I don’t give thanks for all of them every day, but I do have to find gratitude for some of them 365 days a year.

• I am grateful for my three living children.  During the worst times of this illness when there was little hope for diagnosis or cure, they were the motivation that kept me alive.  They are amazing humans, and I feel so blessed that the universe has sent them into my life.
• I am grateful to have only endured the death of one of my children when so many women in the world lose far more of theirs due to natural disasters or preventable problems such as starvation and illnesses borne by poor sanitation.  I hope that my remaining three children are blessed with long, healthy and happy lives.
• I am grateful for my metaphysical gifts which have greatly advanced my healing at deeper levels than I ever fathomed possible.  Opening to them has changed my lie in ways I never dreamed of in my younger years.  I am so grateful to be able to use them to help others, too.
  
• I am grateful for my health care providers who work to improve my overall quality of life.  Through years of working intensely with some of them, they have also become close friends.
• I am grateful for both drugs and herbs which help me heal.  I am grateful for the current progress we are making with my healing, painful though it may be.
• I am grateful that I have decent health insurance.  Even though I pay for a large percentage of my health expenses out of pocket, health insurance does cover part of it.  Everyone in the country should be so privileged to have the same or better.
  
• I am grateful that I am able to buy organic food.  Eating organic is not a lifestyle choice for me.  It’s a medical necessity.  Food free of synthetic pesticides prevents me from having reactions that include extreme fatigue (even worse than what I normally endure), breathing problems, and fibromyalgia pain among others.
• I am grateful to have a home where I am safe and able to live healthily.  For many with multiple chemical sensitivities, housing is a huge challenge.  They can’t afford to buy a safe place and finding an affordable safe home to rent is almost impossible.  I am also extremely grateful that the house is still standing and relatively undamaged after a lightning strike in 2009.
• I am grateful for an ex-husband who is such a loving dad to our kids.  I am grateful for our amicable divorce that was completed this year.  I am grateful for all of the positive changes and growth in my life that came through the divorce.
• I am grateful for the beautiful new name that I chose during the divorce.  It makes me smile each time I sign it.
• I am grateful for my intelligence and education.  The disease I am facing requires a large amount of research and action on the part of the patient, and I am able to find and absorb that knowledge.  Without the skills I have, my healing process would not have advanced as far as it has.
• I am grateful for the good (relatively speaking) health days I have.  Any time I get to go for a walk, go to a park,  go to a farmers’ market, or go to a social event, I feel blessed.
• I am grateful for all that photography has brought to my life in terms of stress relief and in giving me a new way to look at the world.  I see new things around me that I never noticed before (especially with my beloved macro lens involved!).
• I am grateful to live in Austin.  Even though I may complain about the heat and allergens and lack of snow, I appreciate the liberal eco-friendly culture that abounds here.  
• And last but not least, I am grateful for the friends, near and far, who have helped me keep some semblance of sanity throughout all of this.    

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Recently on a Lyme related list that I read, one of the new members asked what detoxing was.  For me, that’s detoxification is something that is such a part of my vocabulary and life that it’s almost like asking me what breathing is.  I actually had to stop and think about it.

Detoxification is a natural process we do all the time.  It’s our bodies’ way of getting rid of anything we take in that is toxic.  In our modern world, we absorb a lot of synthetic chemicals that our bodies don’t need or want through the food we eat (pesticides, synthetic ingredients, artificial colors and flavoring, and more), the air we breathe (air “fresheners,” paints, cleaners, gas fumes, and more), and the products we wear (shampoos, deodorants, detergents, makeup, and more). 

In a healthy human, detoxification happens naturally through any excreted bodily fluid:  Urine, feces, sweat, tears, mucus, breastmilk, even semen.  Anything that our body puts out has the ability to contain the toxins we have absorbed.  Most commonly our liver and kidneys do this filtering and send the waste products out through our urine and bowel movements.  However, with the high synthetic chemical load in our bodies, we dump unnecessary chemicals through our other fluids as well.  This is how you end up with studies showing high levels of toxic chemicals in breastmilk.

For some of us with impaired detoxification systems due to various issues, detoxing is rough. My Lyme has combined with genetic issues to make my liver my weakest organ in my body, and so I struggle to get toxic chemicals out.  This in turn is part of what creates my multiple chemical sensitivities. I am not alone in this:  Many with autoimmune issues struggle with impaired detoxification.

So then how does one intentionally detox to force more of the chemicals we are exposed to out of our bodies rather than storing them in our body fat?  There are many natural ways to do it.  One of the easiest is sweating.  Exercising, saunas, or anything that makes you sweat will help reduce your toxic chemical load.

Another way is through diet.  Eating an organic whole foods diet of any type assists the body in detoxifying.  First, the less garbage you put in, the less garbage you have to get out.  Second, natural food has many healing properties.  Eating well can help undo previous damage to your body and can assist in detoxing any harsh chemicals your body is storing.

Many people like to try popular cleanses that they find on the internet including the Master Cleanse.  The Master Cleanse involves fasting for a designated amount of time (3-10+ days depending on which plan you follow) and during that time only drinking a mixture of lemon juice, water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup.  There is some truth to this helping with detoxification:  Lemon juice does assist in liver cleansing.  However, cleanses like this can also be dangerous.  Because you stop eating solids, the body no longer has the means to have abundant bowel movements.  That means many of the toxins you are releasing are getting stuck in your body rather than being sent out through the stools.  Cleanses like this can be made safer by adding in organic low carbohydrate vegetables to assist with the detoxification.  However, all cleanses really should be done under the guidance of an appropriate practitioner.  (See below.)

Cleanses are NOT healthy when one uses them in order to regularly binge.  I know individuals who will fast during weekdays in order to consumer large amounts of sugar, gluten, and alcohol on the weekends.  This is really not good for one’s body.  Many of us will cheat on our healthy diets occasionally to have a piece of wedding cake or such, but treating one’s body with flagrant disrespect by binge eating and fasting is really not a good idea.  A slow but steady diet of healthy organic foods is the far better approach to healthy eating.

There are also many supplements that can cause or support detoxification.  Because of the detoxification impairment I battle, I am constantly on supplements that can support my body’s natural means, though I rarely take supplements to encourage additional detoxification.  These supplements that I take help my liver process the chemicals which it struggles with otherwise.  I can tell when I am taking them and when I stop.

If you are considering doing a cleanse or using supplements to assist with detoxification, I very strongly recommend you use a reputable local practitioner to help you.  In particular, chiropractors and naturopaths have training in this area; some integrative doctors do as well.  If you use an experienced practitioner who uses muscle testing, they can help you in finding what your body actually needs to detox from and what will best assist in this process rather than randomly trying things to see what works.  This increases efficiency and saves time and money in the long run.  These practitioners can also help you when unexpected issues surface.  Detoxification is not always straightforward or easy:  It can sometimes cause miserable flu-like symptoms.  It may also bring up serious emotional reactions as the body purges all that it does not need to store.  Thus, having a practitioner to assist you can ease your misery in the process and keep you from going into a serious state of crisis.  You want your net result to be a healthier body, not just a miserable experience with no lasting positive health benefits.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

You shouldn't be ashamed of your pain. You have the right to have your pain treated. ~Naomi Judd

In the fall of 2013, the media started bringing attention to how the DEA was going to make hydrocodone a Schedule II drug (which finally happened in October 2014) in order to cut down on prescription drug abuse.  Since hydrocodone is one of the few painkillers that works well for me and that I don’t react to, I needed to find a pain specialist who had a triplicate prescription pad since none of my other practitioners have one.  I didn’t want to wait until the change actually happened because I knew pain specialists would be having an influx of new patients which would make it difficult to get in for a new patient appointment.

I solicited recommendations from those on my healthcare team, and I selected the one doctor most frequently named.  I then had to be accepted by him as his client:  He has a 16 page application.  In part, this serves to scare off drug-seekers without true health problems who just want an easy fix.  For me, filling out that application caused a much bigger reaction than I realized was going to happen.  As I filled it out, I became very depressed.  I already knew that I lived with chronic pain, even with drugs and additional natural healing support to take the edge off of the pain.  However, the application made it very clear to me how much pain was limiting my life.  Suddenly, I realized that it wasn’t just because of the need to have access to hydrocodone that I needed a pain specialist.  It was because I was living with chronic pain.  I have a pain problem.

When I initially saw that first pain specialist, he asked me what brought me to his office.  I told him that I had late disseminated Lyme disease.  His response was, “Well, that’s why you have pain.”  I breathed a huge sigh of relief.  I had been all worked up that I was going to have to convince this doctor of the reality of my pain, and he was immediately offering me more drugs than I was willing to accept due to his familiarity with the difficulty of my condition.

After almost a year with this doctor, it became very obvious to me that he was not the right doctor for me.  The medication he had me on was causing life-threatening side effects yet he didn’t seem to care.  However, I was concerned about switching doctors.  If a patient sees too many pain specialists without settling on one, they are quickly labeled as a drug seeker and get a reputation in the medical community.  It is very hard to find a good practitioner even without all the complicated issues my case provides.  I had one pain specialist’s office refuse to accept my case due to my chemical sensitivities.  Mercifully, the next doctor I tried was willing to take me on:  He views me as a challenge, and he likes challenges.

It is very difficult in some cases such as mine to find appropriate and adequate medication for pain.  The overall trend is that patients in severe pain are not properly medicated and the medical community at large underestimates their pain.  Last February, I read an article in the local newspaper that made me blow steam out of my ears.  Speaking of the about-to-be-released Zohydro LR, a long acting form of hydrocodone, the article stated, “… the Fed Up! Coalition wrote a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg saying, ‘In the midst of a severe drug epidemic fueled by overprescribing of opioids, the very last thing the country needs is a new, dangerous, high-dose opioid.’”  This quote could not be more wrong.  There are actually a dearth of good drug options for those who suffer from chronic pain.  This new form of an already proven relatively safe drug was a great advance, but it really wasn’t that much of a change from what was out there.  It’s not really a new drug but a different form of an already (overly) popular drug.  It's also not more powerful than the slow acting form of hydrocodone:  If anything, in my non-medical opinion, it's probably less likely to cause addiction because Zohydro LR doesn't provide a "high" because of it's extended release mechanism which provides slow but steady pain relief without a rapid onset.  However, the prejudice of this advocacy group and its protests only hamper the needs of those with true health issues who are lacking in good options for pain relief.

I regret that I went so many years without seeing a pain specialist based on my misguided belief that I didn’t need one.  I also didn’t want the stigma of seeing a pain specialist because I move in circles where many frown upon Western drugs.  However, pain specialists really do have far better knowledge of how to manage pain than a general practitioner or even a Lyme doctor.  Even though two years later we’re still struggling to get my pain under control, we've still made some improvements in my quality of life.  I really wish I had taken this step sooner.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

After my ex-husband and I separated, many people nosily asked me, “Who had the affair?”  The answer was neither of us.  In my former marriage, Lyme was the unwanted third partner who took the cracks in our relationship and broke them wide open.  All chronic and/or acute diseases like late disseminated Lyme greatly affect the personal relationships the patients have with those around them, sometimes for better and not infrequently for worse.

One of the first things that our marriage therapist made us to come to terms with is the fact that I am not the disease I have.  Though it seems like an incredibly simple idea, it was a hard concept to implement at first for both my ex and me.  I hadn’t realized how much we both had integrated Lyme into my identity.   Once we both grasped that concept, it became easier to release some of the blame that belonged on the disease, not on each other.

In digital Lyme groups that I am a member of, I frequently see the term “Lymies” to refer to those suffering from Lyme disease.  It makes me cringe every time.  Calling those who have Lyme by the name Lymies equates them with their disease.  The idea of “people first” language is not a new one; I remember studying it in a special education class in college in 1992.  The premise is simple:  When referring to a person with a disability or disease, refer to the person first and their disability or disease second.  The man with visual impairment rather than the blind man.  The person with Lyme rather than the Lymie.  The woman who has schizophrenia rather than the schizophrenic.  The person comes before their disease as the person is not their disease, and the person is more important than the disease.  While it might make a sentence wordier, that extra bulk is well worth preserving the individuals’ identity over their disabilities and diseases.

It is vitally important not to identify as the condition you are fighting.  It’s equally important not to call it “your” disease.  Once you taken on that disease as part of your identity, it becomes much easier to lose yourself to the disease.  If you make the disease an integral part of who you are, then that makes it even harder to heal because you would be losing part of your identity in regaining your health.  Identifying yourself as your disease holds you back from being all you can be. 

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

I have struggled with parasite issues due to my Lyme compromised immune system.  Many people with immune issues battle parasites, but most don’t want to talk about it.  Our culture has built up a hyper-sanitized idea of health, and for someone to have parasites becomes a judgmental reflection on the poor lifestyle of the parasite host.  That’s simply not true.  All of us, even in the US, are regularly exposed to parasites through our pets, through the soil, and through our food supply.  Most people, however, have healthy immune systems which are usually able to fight off the parasites.  Those like me whose immune systems are compromised aren’t so fortunate.  Our bodies can’t easily kill foreign invaders.  Thus, the parasites are able to establish themselves causing a great deal of trouble for the host.

Parasite testing can be an effort in futility.  I’ve run multiple parasite screens through many companies in 2004, 2011 and 2012.  Only one of those eight tests came back positive for parasites despite the fact that I had obvious symptoms of parasitic infection and applied kinesiology had pinpointed parasites as the cause of my misery.  In one lecture I heard by a Lyme literate doctor, the doctor said that he estimated only 40% of parasites are caught through testing even using the “better” independent testing companies.  I’d guess that estimate might actually be too high.

So what do parasite symptoms look like in humans?  Digestive woes of any sort are often the first symptoms.  That includes abdominal cramping, vomiting, diarrhea, food sensitivities, flatulence, and burping.  Diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome may be misdiagnoses of parasites.  Parasites can cause anemia and other deficiencies that will show up on routine blood work.  Furthermore, parasites also can trigger severe anxiety and depression, mental symptoms that are usually not thought to be due to parasites by mainstream practitioners.

When it comes to treating parasites, Western medicine is lacking.  The only thing most doctors know how to do is prescribe metronidazole or its cousins, and metronidazole is the devil’s drug for many people.  It is very difficult to tolerate due to the severe neurological symptoms it can cause.  My general practitioner works frequently with people with compromised immune systems, and he said that 95% of his patients don’t tolerate metronidazole.  I was one of those who didn’t.  It caused me to lose feeling in my arms and to lose basic vocabulary.  It took about a month to regain what I had lost once I stopped taking the metronidazole.  However, most GPs don’t have many other options at their disposal to treat parasites.   

This is one area where natural medicine can be superior to Western medicine.  There are many natural treatments for parasites.  Among the many things I’ve used for parasites while under the care of health practitioners are medicinal turpentine (NOT the stuff from the hardware store), cloves, pumpkin seeds, essential oils, black walnut hulls, artemesia, homeopathy, vibropathy, acupuncture, crystals, and much more.  My practitioners and I use muscle testing to figure out which of the available options is the best means for me to attack each particular species.  However, treating parasites is still an uphill battle because my immune system is compromised by Lyme.

So when my older son was 10, I was doing parasite testing.  I had collected stool samples to be tested by a company in another state and was in the kitchen boxing them up for the overnight carrier to pick them up off my front porch.  My son walked in and saw me labeling the package.  He asked, “What’s in the box?”  I paused for a moment before I replied, “Poop.”  He cheerfully replied, “Ok!” and then went on to whatever activity he had planned to do in the next room.  I stood there for a minute thinking, “Really?  I tell my kid that I’m shipping poop and he doesn’t question me?  Does this mean he thinks I’m totally crazy?  Or is this what living with chronic illness has devolved our lives to that my child thinks shipping poop is a completely normal activity?”  I was able to see how absurdly funny the situation was even then, but it still was bittersweet.  Such is life with Lyme, a compromised immune system, and a constant battle for health.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance