My Personal Health Journey

Over the last several decades I have had more than my fair share of mystery illnesses. My journey began 20 years ago while living and working in Colorado.

One day, I was using a stainless steel cleaner to clean a range hood. Even though I had the windows open, after 30 minutes of spraying the cleaner, I had started coughing and my throat felt sore.

Three days later, I was still coughing, had a sore throat and now my legs had turned purple. I went to see my acupuncturist who specializes in Traditional Chinese Medicine. He told me I had stagnant blood in my heart and that I should see a cardiologist. I had something attack my lungs and it ended up in my heart?!?

This mystery continued for nine months and every 6-8 weeks I continued to have 99% blockage of an unknown substance that was hard as glass in two different coronary arteries that kept growing back inside my heart. It was not cholesterol plaque. After that much time the cardiologist didn’t know what it was and decided it would be best to do a coronary bypass surgery of the two arteries. Not knowing of any other alternative, I agreed to do it.

To this day, I still do not know exactly what that substance was that turned my life upside down because conventional medicine only knew to perform a surgery to save my life. Could I have done diagnostic lab tests to find out what was actually attacking my heart? Could I have done a protocol to eliminate that substance? Could I have avoided invasive surgery and a years worth of recovery and exorbitant medical bills? These questions began my journey of studying functional health which led me to my certification as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner. I learned how to heal my own body before I felt comfortable enough to work with others.

After recovering from heart surgery, I went back to school to get my degree in healthcare. I worked in skilled nursing rehab and outpatient PT clinics for 17 years. I witnessed how patients were struggling to fully recover during rehab and had difficulty gaining back their optimal health. I realized they were experiencing a cascading effect of their organ systems malfunctioning, similar to what I went through. Much like me, going through a serious health crisis exhausted their stress hormones. This caused sleep and digestive issues with malnutrition, and malabsorption, Under this amount of stress the gut isn't able to allow proper digestion and absorb the nutrients needed for healing because the body is in survival mode.

Stress will cause the body to function only in fight or flight when we go through any kind of life crisis. The loss of a loved one, loss of a job, any kind of major life changes due to injury or have any kind of mental stress can go through this organ system cascading effect creating metabolic chaos in the body. The body is a very complex organism and when one organ system is weakened it will cascade throughout the whole body. Through functional diagnostic lab data we can investigate specific issues and create a custom protocol to help them finally heal.

My desire is to help as many people as possible and continue to learn more about functional health and wellness.