My Burnout And Brain Fires That Lead Me To The Root
I overcame multiple chronic and unmanageable diseases as a teen, which took me on a path to find answers. Discovering integrative root-cause medicine allowed me to help more migraine sufferers than I could have ever dreamed and have the health I’ve always wanted. Helping discover the underlying causes and put out the brain fires causing the pain that keeps us from our families is what makes me burn when I wake up in the morning.
I want you to know who I really am. Today, I know how to keep myself healthy, but it wasn’t always like this and there have been times I was incredibly scared of what my life was looking like. This is my story and I hope it gives you an idea of who I really am.
I came into the world as a blank slate with a huge heart and incredible passion. My mom was a nurse which is probably where I got my care for people from, and my dad a carpenter where I got my love for systems based thinking.
Growing up, family was always a huge part of my life. We moved to Canada to find a better life and start a new family luckily ending in avoiding a war breaking out which could have meant even more casualties.
Despite being thousands of miles away, we took every summer we could to go see our family in Croatia.
As a kid, I always had a sweet tooth.
It probably came from my eastern European heritage that loves fruits, sweets and pasta.
This had a huge effect on my health and set the foundation for the colds and flus I would get that would be treated with antibiotics regularly.
Completely unknown to me was that these antibiotics I was taking a few times a year wiped out all my gut bacteria and created the perfect storm for food sensitivities, a weak immune system, inflammation, migraines
Even though they made the problem go away in the moment… Relying on quick fixes destroyed my health in the long term.
Only now is science finding out that the mitochondria within every single one of our cells is affected by antibiotics and that dysfunctioning mitochondria is one of the biggest causes of migraines.
But I can’t blame anyone, after all, migraines are thought of as a genetic neurological disease that has no cure right?
So nothing was done to address this for years…
Maybe not drinking enough water that day, maybe the lights being a little too bright and maybe my mom’s perfume that was a little too strong for my senses.
OIt would send me into a state of acute sensory overload.
Everything would get stronger. Sights, sounds, smells… They all hurt.
It would grow and grow until I was in so much pain I couldn’t do anything but hide.
I had to get away from everything.
I would shut myself in my room, block out all the incoming senses and lie in bed to try and sleep it off.
Its the only thing that would ever help.
But it wasn’t that easy.
It wouldn’t let me sleep.
At least not until it got so bad that I became nauseous and vomited into what became my designated migraine bowl…
It ruined a lot of days I’ll never have back.
Getting through school was tough because of the major burnout. The combination of a rough gut + regular migraines + wanting to put on muscle + work and studies lead to a huge bout of fatigue, all kinds of muscular, joint and head pain and really bad hormones.
Superficially, I looked strong. But as we know, lots of illnesses are invisible.
Graduation and receiving my license to practice homeopathic medicine was a huge step in my journey towards helping others,
but it was only the first step. It gave me a set of tools that I could help everything from colds,
It taught me that the body had a higher set of rules that it functioned by which took priority over simple mechanics. For example, whereas a migraine was understood as a dilating and constricting of blood vessels in the brain leading to pain, it is really just a symptom of the brain trying to protect itself from damage that was already being done, even prior to a migraine.
The body will sacrifice less important systems to save more important ones, as well as using pain as a mechanism to get our attention.
Homeopathy was amazing but I still wasn’t addressing many of the root causes in an integrated fashion that would satisfy my systems-based thinking and something felt “off.”
Then I found holistic health coaching and years later, my entire understanding of the body changed.
Whereas before I was using the medical model that breaks the body down into separate pieces so that it can understand them individually to develop protocols for them…
Now I was taught by the masters in the health and wellness community to see the body as an integrated whole.
Where every system, depended on every other system and stress could overflow from one system into another, causing symptoms. For example, gut inflammation disabling our core abdominals, creating structural tension and leading to tension headaches.
This is where I found my love for migraines.
Even though migraines are mostly centered around the head and brain, the causes can be far from it.
Migraines are essentially a whole body disorder because the stress that can lead to their trigger can come from other overburdened systems.
From the gut and our food sensitivities, to our hormones and neurotransmitters, to even our emotions and posture, these all play a role in triggering, causing, and maintaining head pain and knowing this changed my life. This is why I created the 10 steps program which you can find out more about here.
With this new understanding, I was determined to bring a new and much healthier perspective to the community.
Whereas initially, everything around headaches was blamed on the person. But as migraine sufferers, we fought hard and still do to this day to take that blame off of ourselves…
But now, we can integrate everything and understand that migraines are a fully systemic issue that requires not just our own responsibility but the responsibility of our friends and family as well to support the healthy habits and changes that are required to become migraine free.
It’s only together that we can prevent the migraine pain from affecting each generation after us by avoiding the progressive weakening of our genes through bad lifestyle management, environmental toxins and covering up of chronic illness.
Our genes will either get weaker each generation, making each generation progressively less resilient to migraines, or stronger each generation, and be predisposed to a higher migraine threshold.
Through educating on the many different areas that migraines can be coming from, the different contributors to illnesses, stresses and all of the deviations from normal patterns that put stress on our bodies…
I am determined to change how migraines are viewed, talked about and dealt with.
The days of having to deal with doctors who don’t listen, put you down and simply throw drugs at you should be over.
The studies are there and show the incredible value of everything other than heavy side effect medications, that in many cases work much better than them.
When you are supported as an individual and your needs are actually taken care of…
When you are listened to and given real ways to deal with the problems coming into your life and brain, then you are free to become healthy and your body will be ready for it.
It’s my mission to help migraine sufferers take the leap towards addressing the underlying causes that contribute to stress on the brain, heart, and gut that lead to all of the different manifestations of head pain we know as migraines.
I believe in always addressing the root cause of the problem.
When we fix the reason our brain is migraining we don’t have to stay stuck on incredibly restrictive diets or hide away from the world in case something triggers us. We can go back to building our lives up.
The most powerful tool we have in medicine is the bodies natural healing capacity and supporting this should be the norm.
There is no greater healing force in the body than our cells ability to replicate, regenerate and rejuvenate. Any medicine we use only works because we support this. The brain is neuroplastic and neurogenic, it just needs the right stimulus.
Understanding the person with migraines is much more important than understanding the migraine that has the person.
Everyday I get told another story of how a patient was not listened to, shrugged off or told they were fine and their illness was in their head. Instead we should be connecting with what is going on and how the symptoms we experience are a sign of the systems in the body that need correcting. Your body is telling you exactly what you need.
Join me on this journey through the studies I share on my blogs and education about their migraines here.
