Where Have I Been?

The last post I made feels like a lifetime ago. It was titled, "When the Basics are too Much" and I guess they truly were too much because life spun a little out of control and my own health and life needed attention before I could get back to helping others. It happens with chronic conditions, and with life itself. But God is faithful and God wasn't done.

My spiral started when I slammed my hand in the car door and broke my thumb. I was in a removable splint type of thing and the tip of my thumb stuck out the end. This matters because three weeks into healing, I leaned to hug my daughter goodnight in her bed, my knee landed on something she'd forgotten under the covers, and I reflexively reached out my hand to catch myself....and landed right on the tip of that thumb. The crunch and crack that followed was truly an unwelcome sound and the sensation that followed, after the intense pain I thought I'd finally gotten past, was equally unwelcome. What followed was 18 months of being unable to use my thumb for anything. I couldn't grip, couldn't type, couldn't hold on to things, couldn't button a shirt, couldn't put on socks. It truly was 18 months of snail-like healing, thanks to the storm going on and most likely my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I never realized how much I hyperextended my thumb until it led to me constantly aggravating the injury. I couldn't zip my Lympha Press and the progress I'd made was lost. It truly was a frustrating time. In the early weeks of my broken thumb, I also got food poisoning twice!

Some months into my thumb recovery, I woke up one morning with excruciating pain in my toe. The sheet caused pain. The AIR caused pain. I couldn't walk. Gout. That was also a slow recovery and knocked me out for a couple of weeks. Even when it resolved, there was still a constant ache in the joint that never went away. I thought that surely that was the end of the turmoil, but I was wrong. Covid hit and from that I developed chronic bronchitis that lasted several months. Because my lipedema body does what it does, I gained a ton of inflammation, and I was very frustrated by this point. Almost a year after I broke my thumb, after recovering from the gout, then the two illnesses, I tried to resume gentle therapy again, both some fascia work and pneumatic compression, but it was an utter failure. It knocked me into an exhausted state with increased symptoms and literally no results at all. My body was telling me to wait.

And so I waited. During that time I completely shifted my focus from "dealing with chronic illness" to resting and restoring. I breathed deeply. I listened to calming and healing music and frequencies. I soaked in baths full of Dead Sea minerals and splashes of chamomile. I sat in the sun and watched my daughter play in the back yard. I laid in the sauna blanket and just let myself be warm and let the infrared soak into my tissues. I drank water with fresh lemon and sea salt and focused on healthy foods. I used castor oil packs to support my liver. I found reasons to laugh and be grateful. I prayed that through that, my body would settle and relax and find that state of heal and restore instead of panic and pain. For a full year I did not do all the things I'd been obsessed about doing for my health conditions. I just did things that were healing for my soul and my vagus nerve.

Towards the end of that year, I found a little gem called Block Therapy. As I listened to a health summit about fascia and pain, Deanna Hansen began discussing fascia in a new way. I'd studied fascia health and its dysfunction as related to lipedema and hypermobility, but this fresh way of looking at how God created our bodies, how fascia can be restored, how it can be done in your own home...this resonated. I'd seen the pictures of lipedema tissue and its gripping, twisting fascia. I truly felt like this was my way forward. I spent less than $10 and began. It was money well-spent.

But life wasn't done surprising me. Just a few months after feeling like this new approach was going to work for me. Within a very short time, the pain from the gout went away, my thumb was close to normal again, and I was losing the dreaded inflammation and inches that came with it...and then our whole family got Epstein-Barr virus. During the first week we couldn't eat, had fever and pain, and couldn't really move from the bed. They're not kidding when they say it hits adults harder than children and teens. I don't know that I've ever felt like I literally couldn't move. But one night I did move, getting up to go to the bathroom around 2 a.m. Because I hadn't eaten I started feeling dizzy and woke up sometime later on the bathroom floor with my knee jerked out of place and a nice concussion and whiplash from slamming my head into the edge of the bathtub.

It took us literal months to recover. This happened in May and it was December before we could do any type of activity without being completely exhausted. Nothing got done. However, it was during this time of recovery that I truly became a believer in Block Therapy. I felt too bad to think of doing anything to help myself at first, but after a week or so of really horrible concussion symptoms not getting better and still not being able to put weight on my knee, I remembered the advice I'd heard on a Block Therapy podcast...heat (never ice), and block around an injury if the injury itself is too painful. I also remembered that they had a new concussion protocol and the first few days didn't appear to put any pressure directly on the head. So, I sat in bed with a block on my calf and then my hamstring, moving them a little closer to my knee as I healed. Within 24 hours there was vast improvement. Within three weeks, I was almost back to normal with both the knee injury and the concussion. We started the new year, 2025, after four years of physical challenges, with hope and determination that things could only get better and our Bible verse for the year was about faith moving mountains. We thought that was because of all those mountains previously mentioned, but it turned out that there was another mountain ahead.

Physically, I was making progress. It is a long recovery from repeated trauma and sickness over several years, but with block therapy I was making progress. And then in February, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. I woke every day with a stress I'd never imagined as we went through three months of not knowing as tests were done and we were left with the choice to stay where we were or relocate to Houston for two months in order for him to get the best care with the best possible outcome. So, we moved, not knowing how we would pay for treatment or housing. After years of relying on my husband to do almost every daily task due to my health, it was left to me because as treatment progressed, he no longer could. With the strides I'd made using Block Therapy, I was able to not only do what he needed, but see to our family's daily needs like shopping, cleaning, cooking, and being a parent. These things seem like normal life, but most of them had been outside my ability for several years.

Before that stay in Houston, I pushed through at lightning speed and got the Block Therapy certification I was working on for that small window when we thought our life was settling. It was stressful and challenging, but it was the right decision, because as I write this it's been four months since we got back home from his cancer treatment and he's still not back to his normal self (though he is cancer free!). Block Therapy is helping him heal and recover and it's helping me continue to do what I need to do each day. My next level certification is almost complete and I'm working very hard on myself to restore health and undo what the last four years of traumatic injury, illness, and stress have dumped on this body that was already dealing with multiple chronic conditions.

The road has been so very long long, but it is blessed. Every piece creates another part of this journey and gives me reasons to be eternally grateful. Every whispered, or cried, prayer strengthens my foundation of determination and hope. I sometimes wish my health walk had been linear and smooth, but it has been full of upheaval and challenges that just kept piling up and forcing me to either completely cave or continue on to deeper understanding of my body and my faith. I can truly say that I'm at a place I couldn't have imagined I'd be, with knowledge. training, and experience beyond what I thought I'd have, with more calm and hope in a future that doesn't feel as scary as it did four years ago. The beautiful thing is that in the waiting and healing, I've learned a lot about what that truly means and I'm a better mom, a better wife, a better human, and have more to offer those who need hope and help walking through the maze of chronic conditions just like mine. I'll be sharing specifics about my healing journey over the next few weeks, more ready than ever to help others.