Replay 01 | Becoming Natural Heal From Chronic Illness with Plants

Hi there BN fans! Wow how this week flew! If this week is start of school for any of you mommas out there, bless you! I remember when my 3 boys were littles, I was always excited to get back on a schedule and have a little self time. This week I launched my second to college and while I know without a doubt he is ready to fly, I remember those first days of elementary like they were yesterday and yearn for those sweet moments. No one prepares you to launch the child you spent the last 18-19 years keeping in full focus, safe, fed and alive. I lived my life counting to 3. 1 2 3 heads. And now I have launched two of those three little heads, now handsome young, capable men. Jesus take the wheel! The caboose at our house started his first day of school as a sophomore in high school yesterday and is loving the only child role….maybe a little too much.

Here we go though. Together! The start of school is also a great time to get organized, create better habits, and start new things. We are in it together! As I prepare to “flip the switch” to my new platform (which I pray is completely seamless on your end), I am taking BN back to the first episode this week. I am in awe of the new listeners, THANK YOU, each of you, for your support on this crazy ride. If you only knew how funny it is that of all people, I am doing this and beyond that, absolutely loving it. I look forward to my time to research and record more than anything in my day now. While I know people have picked up well after Becoming Natural began last September, I feel like my history and background and how the heck I got here is important to know.

My bullet point summary:

I am not perfect. And I don’t take myself too seriously. Any step in the right direction is a good one.

I have/had severe Crohns Disease and was dying a slow death before I realized I had to do something different than what I had been doing for 20 plus years. Even if it meant eating a little crow and trying some things I had previously poked fun of.

I am an OT, trained in the medical model, took all the drugs, did all the surgeries, poo-poo’d natural remedies because I was just “too sick”. Nothing natural could help me.

And gratefully, my stubborn eyes got opened. And it was NOT overnight. I am still a slow progression in awe of things that are improving in my life when I continue to allow time and new knowledge a chance.

So, join me today listening to my short story and How this little space came to be. I think most important to me that you know, is that I am still a work in progress. I am nowhere close to perfect, but always striving for improvement. I am still unlearning old ways I thought were best and learning new ways to help myself while still applying the good things that we have learned thru solid and valuable growth in western medicine. There ARE some really great things! I do NOT dismiss modern medicine. We just have to learn how to use discernment for what is best for our bodies if we want them to last.

Finally, know that I am not a doctor, I am not attempting to treat anyone and always consult your practitioner before making changes to your health. I am just here sharing my story not only of getting healthy from a lifetime of illness, but my faith and miracles we witnessed thru the amazing power of prayer and the things I continue to learn that leave me in awe of our incredibly intricate bodies coupled with the incredibly intricate gift of nature to support these miraculously created bodies that are truly a symphony of complexities every second of every day. Enjoy!

Wow! Hi there! Welcome to Episode One! They say to start dirty so there is nowhere to go but up. I wanted to start my first episode with introducing myself, providing a little history of where I came from and why in the world I started a podcast. Why did I go from “No Way” to “OK”? Todays podcast might be longer than my usual 20 min just to take the time to share my vision and my why. I think I might surprise you. All my life I have surprised my doctors, so why not you too?

I am just a regular mom with a big and always growing faith with 3 handsome teenage boys that mean the world to me. I have 2 very entertaining dogs, and I am a wife to a wonderful husband who literally cannot walk into a hospital without an anxiety attack. He put his best foot forward when we had babies, but it was still a comical struggle. BLESS HIS HEART for the lemon he got in a wife because he has put that fear to the test over and over again. Meanwhile I LOVE the hospital. We are the perfect balance as I get calm in crises which is not what I can say for him. He is the numbers guy and I love him for it because that I am not. I am an Occupational Therapist that finds the hospital to be my second home. I love my job. I love being with the critical patients and the challenge of helping people recover from a health crisis. I have practiced in a variety of settings over the years, but Traumatic Brain Injury has always been my favorite type of patients in the most critical stage of their injury. Straight off the news and into the ICU. That may sound crazy, but what amazes me most about our bodies that were indeed created to heal is that our brains have very orderly stages of healing in the same way you might know we heal thru predictable stages of grief. There is a divine and organized pattern to a healing body that I recognized and it created a deep desire for me to connect the dots between the process of physical healing and how our bodies are so beautifully and divinely connected to the earth, thus THRIVING on things created by God and HEALING when using those gifts appropriately. I was not always so “aware” you might say, even so far as to say I was cynical about all that hippie stuff. I have come a LONG way, baby!

Before I was ever an OT, I was battling what was ultimately diagnosed as Crohn’s Disease when I was 24. My symptoms started as a teen and progressively got worse over 20+ years. However, when I was finally diagnosed in the late 90’s and working in an Acute Care Hospital with a Level One Trauma Center I had never once heard of Crohns Disease. Now, it’s a household name. Why is that? I plan to dive into that later in the podcast.

I had 2 serious reconstructive surgeries of my stomach while still working in that hospital. I was frustrated that I had restrictions with lifting my patients and a job as a Pharmaceutical rep landed in my lap. For that stage, my body needed a less physical job so I took it. I sold one of the best-selling acid reducing pills on the market. While I missed being in the thick of the excitement of the hospital, I loved being out in the world during the day and seeing another angle of the medical industry, talking to doctors in their offices versus the ICUs and learning their prescribing behaviors.

% of my stomach removed in: 2015

Somewhere after my third child was born and before I became so ill, my eyes were opened, albeit slowly, to the fact that I was dying a slow death. All jokes aside. I was hard core medical model. I went to school at one of the TOP hospitals in the nation among doctors who performed “Firsts” in their discipline. I LOVED the medical field. Had I not been so sick after OT school, I would have gone on to Medical School. I took the drugs, I encouraged the meds for my patients to help them be as comfortable as possible for therapy and I pedaled the drugs in doctors offices. I experienced every perspective and I don’t think it was an accident. I think the Lord was giving me nuggets at every stage to stick in my arsenal for the future..

I asked “Why” for the first time I was on a drug that suppressed my immune system that made my gums started bleeding, I got a ganglion cyst, and I was hospitalized twice for pneumonia before they took me off of it. I started asking WHY in the world would I want to suppress my immune system and open my body up to such potentially harmful side effects? I had excruciating pain, the meds helped a little, but by no means were they healing me, they were simply covering up symptoms of the larger illness. Around that time, I asked my “Crazy Essential oil” friend (before everyone knew about Essential oils) how to help my bleeding gums and my cyst and the fluid that would not clear from my lungs. While skeptical, I did what she said, and I was shocked that not only did they work, even my doctors were stunned when I was able to cancel a pleurocentesis and my dentist thought he had the wrong chart based on my improvement in my gums. In my eyes, everything needed a good scientific study as proof, but who studies essential oils? When those oils worked, I had to know it wasn’t snake oil. I began to take a deep dive into plants. I went college textbooks studying botany and anything I could get my hands on to explain why plant qualities were created for what reason. I knew God gave us a garden and I knew it was for a reason. I just needed to understand it. I learned about terpenes, sesquiterpenes and flavinoids in the essential oils of plants and how they truly worked for our bodies just as they worked for the plant to prevent bacteria, keep bugs away, increase antioxidants, protect plants from their enemies, and a thousand other things.

We witnessed miracles in my healing of a disease that supposedly ‘can’t be healed’. One I was determined to beat, but nearly got the best of me. Once I made a full recovery, over years, My minister told me that my miracles were not meant to keep to myself, but to find a way to share them with those who prayed for me so that their faith could be increased to see how their prayers were answered and to share with anyone who would listen about the depths of despair we experienced, yet only God brought me out of the pit.

I love sharing that piece of my story. I had incredible doctors and nurses who shed tears over me. The doctor who saved my life I know fought harder for me than anyone else would have. To be that young and grow so incredibly in my faith, my marriage and perspective on life was truly a gift. A gift that I always knew I wanted to share.

What I really want to be is The Go-to Podcast for Moms Who Want to Clean Up their Lifestyle & Get Control of their Health. Being a mom with chronic illness is not for the weary and I would love nothing more than to share all the things I wish I had known 2o years ago. I am fully convinced I could have saved myself and my family a whole lot of grief. God must have planted some super powers in me and the prayers prayed for me sustained me because I never gave up. Much like taking forever in waking up to the crazy plant side of healing, I was very stubborn. I had 3 kids in car seats, pulled over to throw up, and continued on my way to our activities I wanted so desperately to be a “NORMAL” mom. I didn’t want to sit at home and focus on being sick. And most of all, I didn’t want my kids to suffer because I couldn’t do something.

As I continue to study, I continue to find things we have in our otherwise healthy lives that can cause long term problems for us. Sickness, illness, endocrine blockers, toxins. It. Is unbelieveable! I’ve learned its not just about diet and exercise, but about removing things from our lives as well. We have to be so vigilant and it can become overwhelming.

I decided to start a podcast to address those who are searching for ways to be a better friend to their body. Women who want to eliminate toxins from your life or simply just don’t feel your best and don’t know why? Moms who want to make cleaner choices for their family but don’t know where to begin? As moms and women, we make the decisions for our family and I only hope I didn’t learn too late to make an impact on my boys to always ask questions. To always be skeptical. And sadly, I hope they learn that not everyone or every company is working for the good of our bodies.

I tried to heal my body, taking all the medications and doing all the surgeries, and I still found myself in a broken and debilitated shell of a body. When I realized I was years into a lifelong disease, only getting worse when my doctors ran out of answers, I was dependent upon medication that wasn’t helping me and painkillers that simply made me not care about the pain, and I was desperate.

I was tired of feeling bad all the time, unable to eat at will, missing out on my kids’ activities, and spending my life in doctor’s appointments. If I was going to get healthy, I needed to open my mind to alternative solutions that I once thought were ridiculous. With a little research, I found strategies that worked and actually provided incredible relief. I slowly embraced a new holistic lifestyle that made sense with how I knew the body worked, how it so beautifully aligned with my faith, and how our bodies were truly designed to heal when given the proper environment.

I have a unique perspective, having been trained in the medical model. I encourage medications to ensure my patients have a comfortable therapy session. I peddled one of the top acid-reducing pills, among others, as a pharmaceutical rep, and I took every medication under the sun for my illness.

What I am not: I am not anti-all medicine. I believe we have made huge strides in Western medicine, but I do think we jump too quickly to take medicine, not allowing our bodies to its thing naturally. I am far from perfect. I am not a die-hard health nut and dont eat a perfect diet. I am not an exercise guru and work out 2 hours a day. I do believe in moderation of everything in life so that every change we can make is easy an sustainable until we can add another change and another. Before long, we can look back and see how far we have come and it seemed so simple! I will always be a work in progress and do not profess to know it all. I’m just a mom who understands how the body works and loves to read a good science journal or medical review in my spare time. I am obsessed with personal growth and love to research whatever interests me at the time. I like facts and testimonies, but most importantly, I like results. I have done a 180 by opening my mind to the benefits or even the harm of what goes on, in and around my body. I have never dramatically thrown out the food in my pantry or pills in my medicine cabinet, but I do love to learn each day how to read labels with fresh eyes and how to treat my body holistically first before we rush to the doctors office. When it’s time for a refill, I replace a potentially harmful product with a quality product. My goal is for every step to be a step in the right direction. Small, achievable steps are more likely to lead to success than dramatic actions that cannot be sustained over time. Everything I do, you can do, too. I am totally normal and totally fallible, down to drinking my daily Coke. Please don’t judge.

In each episode of Becoming Natural, I hope to share a piece of my redemptive story, tips and tricks I have learned to help me make better health decisions, and there is no way to separate any of that out from the incredible faith journey I have taken over 25 years of praying and having faith that I would be healed.

In this podcast, I’ll share with you:

-simple food swaps

-how I addressed my chronic illness and symptoms naturally

-how to eliminated harmful household chemicals (and saved money!)

-when you can use plants as medicine

-how emotions (good and bad) play a massive role in your health

-the incredible value of preventative health

-how my faith played a role in my own healing journey

-how you can support a loved one with chronic illness

-how to tap into the earth to heal while keeping it in my lane of faith

-and so much more!

If you are ready to start living clean in a dirty world, follow me and never miss an episode of Becoming Natural. Let’s get this podcast started!