So this is how it all started…

There I was, rocking back and forth in the fetal position on my bathroom floor balling my eyes out chugging baking soda water. Bargaining with whatever higher power was up there, if they could just take the pain away I would never eat pizza or drink alcohol AGAIN. I could barely breath and it felt like someone was stabbing my bladder with a thousand needles and wringing it dry. It was non-stop agonizing pain, and ten times worse when I tried to pee.

So, how did I get here?

As a kid I can remember always having “bladder infections”. In high school I would find myself leaving school early all the time because I couldn’t handle the pain. I would always go to my doctor, pee in a cup and be sent home with a course of antibiotics. All before the culture even came back. I was being treated for Urinary tract infections, yet my cultures always came back negative for any bacteria.

I finally seeked out a specialist and saw a Urologist, where I had an extremely intrusive and uncomfortable procedure called a Cystoscopy. Basically they stick a little camera up your urethra into your already burning bladder, fill your irritated bladder with water and fish around in there to see if they can find the answer to your agony. I was then diagnosed with the Auto-Immune disease of Interstitial Cystitis. I’ve been working as a Registered Nurse for 3 years at the time and never heard of the term. But I knew Auto-immune meant bad news, no cure, stuck with for life.

IC is a chronic condition that causes severe, sometimes constant bladder pain. My Urologist proceeded to tell me I needed to take an antibiotic everyday for the rest of my life because apparently they help shut down your immune response, in turn reducing the pain and inflammation. This all seemed way to barbaric to me. Taking a medication that quite literally means “Anti-life” and turns off my immune system??? My intuition was telling me there had to be another way. So I did what any person does after a seemingly daunting diagnoses. I went to Doctor Google. Everywhere I looked it was “Severely painful chronic condition”, “Don’t fully understand what causes it” and “NO CURE”. Greeeeeeat!! Not only was I constantly in pain but I didn’t know how to stop it. And I was stuck with whatever this was for the rest of my life, with no known cause or cure. At 24 years old, It felt like a death sentence.

Until one day I came across a Naturopath online who also struggled with IC for years, among other terribly crippling Auto-immune diseases, and she healed herself! Of all of them… NATURALLY!! It was in that moment I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. I was always a big believer in living a healthy lifestyle but when it came to natural medicine I always pictured Hippies drinking weird voodoo tonic elixirs given by Shamans in the rainforest; until now.

So then my natural holistic healing journey began! I eliminated anything and everything inflammatory from my diet, did candida cleanses, liver detoxes, colon and parasite cleanses, coffee and apple cider vinegar enemas, drank homemade ozone water, sat in the sauna for hours, Mediated daily, took probiotics GALORE, spent way to much money on a laundry list of natural supplements, bought a juicer, and read every book about gut health and the immune system I could get my hands on. And about 3 months later, I was healed.

True health isn’t about taking a magic pill that reduces our symptoms. We humans are not deficient in pharmaceuticals. We’re deficient in the simple life sustaining necessities like sleep, water, vitamins/minerals, the sun and most importantly, Love. Our bodies are bombarded with toxic chemicals everyday that are all around us. In the food we eat, the water we drink, the products we use, the air we breath and the thoughts we think. That prescription your PCP so easily prescribes you, IS NOT going to heal you. It is only going to stick a band-aid over the real problem while it festers in the shadows until your ticking time bomb reaches its final tick. We need to get to the ROOT of the problem, and treat it at the source.

Thats why I’m here, writing this ridiculously long Bio to try and explain to you that the REAL PROBLEM wasn’t my bladder. My Diagnosis was not something that just randomly happened to me because of some sort of genetic predisposition or case of “Bad luck”. It was all the courses of antibiotics I took for a negative “Infection”. All the over the counter meds I took to control my pain and symptoms. All the crappy food I was eating and alcohol I was drinking. And all the stress I was putting myself under.

Our bodies are smarter than we can ever imagine. And when given the right tools, they can heal themselves. When we cut our finger with a kitchen knife or bruise getting punched in the face, they heal on their own. When we catch a cold and feel like we could sleep for 24 hours straight, its because rest is EXACTLY what our bodies need to heal. We just need to listen.

I’ve went to school, read the books and countless articles, self experimented, watched the documentaries, paid the subscriptions and figured out what our bodies truly need to heal, so you don’t have to. And you don’t need to go to all the extremes I did to feel 100 times better. If you’re struggling, I’m here to give you your power back. It’s time we put an end to all this false information out there that’s only making us sicker. It’s time we stop all the negative self talk and pumping our bodies with harmful toxins, expecting a tiny synthetic pill to solve all our problems. It’s time we really and truly, once and for all- HEAL.