The Past Year of My Life - Buckle Your Seat belts for This One

Hi everyone!

So to kick off my first real, non-introductory blog post, I thought I would share something that not a lot of people know the whole story of, and that is why I did not return to UC Santa Barbara for the rest of my college education.

Something that I want everyone who is reading this to know is that it was not an easy decision for me. I flip-flopped back and forth a lot on what I wanted to do, and up until two days before I was supposed to leave to move into the Alpha Phi house at UCSB, I was planning to go. It wasn't until I started packing that I really realized Santa Barbara is not where I am meant to be.

I had a really hard first year, but I don't know anyone who would say their first year of college was easy. There is so much change that happens, and even though I got used to the constant state of inconsistency, being uprooted from the stability of my life that I had literally never been without was probably more traumatic than I realized. To cope I clung on to people I should have let go, made decisions I should not have made, and one week into college my health problems really started to snowball, and fast.

In eighth grade I realized that candy gave me migraines, particularly sour patch anything, so that was the beginning of my path to crazy diet restriction.

My freshman year of high school my mom had her appendix removed in a miraculous chain of events that I am convinced are the result of divine intervention. She had also been suffering stomach pains almost her entire life, but hers presented differently than mine. Instead of pain every night like I had, she would have a day or a couple of consecutive days in a row where she would be completely immobile and nauseous. She went vegan and it seemed to help, but it did not heal anything. Then one day she made it to the hospital during one of her episodes, they somehow saw the inflammation in her appendix and removed it, and she hasn't had any of her episodes since. I am all for western medicine, but this was the beginning of my distrust for it. To this day, the doctor who removed her appendix claims that was not what was causing all of her issues, but since removing it they've stopped, so you tell me?

My sophomore year of high school I suddenly became unable to eat dairy anymore. I would get horrible stomach aches every night around 5 pm that would knock me to the ground writhing in pain. These were not normal stomach pains or indigestion. These were horrible, unbearable stabbing pains that ebbed and flowed like labor pains: being horrible and painful, then climbing the pain scale to unbearable to the point you can't breathe, then the pain would lessen and the cycle would start over again. No one found anything wrong with me, so I cut out dairy and moved on with my life.

Fast forward about four months. My stomach pains started again, only this time slightly less severe (possibly because I already knew they would pass after a few hours and I learned to ride them out), but also accompanied by headaches. That's when I broke up with gluten for good, and have not looked back since.

I lost around 15 pounds in my senior year of high school, still not totally sure why but I attribute it to stress because I wasn't working out. Fast forward through summer time, and now we are back to my first college days, and this is where it gets interesting, and also really graphic so if you don't like gross stuff, I suggest you stop reading.

During my first few weeks of college, I started bleeding- a lot. And out of somewhere you should honestly never ever bleed. That's right- I'm talking about my butt. Nobody ever talks about this stuff but it's actually really important that everyone be informed about what signs your body could be sending you because god knows the doctors didn't diagnose me until a year after I told them what I believed I had. And I'm not sharing this information because I want everyone to know about my gnarly GI issues. I just really do think it's important to take responsibility for your health, and to look out for yourself when no one else is.

So I was bleeding. A lot. Not randomly, but consistently. I got really lucky to have someone at the time who was looking out for me so I didn't have to go through it all alone. My boyfriend at the time, who shall remain nameless, really did handle the situation extremely well and I'm really lucky that he helped me as much as he did. Whatever I had made me tired. Exhausted. I never wanted to do anything, and going to a school like UCSB you're expected to do a lot. But I just couldn't. I had so many different symptoms that it was confusing, and I have made more lists of diseases to get blood tests done for than I can count on my fingers. And things just kept getting worse.

I had the worst colonoscopy experience of my life in the middle of October of 2016. I was supposed to be knocked out, but I'm missing an enzyme or something where opiates and most drugs don't work on me, so I was awake the whole time. And sobbing. I've never been so traumatized, and I don't think anyone should ever have to see what their insides look like, or feel someone prodding around in them. Doctor Lemon in Santa Barbara- you suck.

I had the adrenaline of being in a completely new place and experiencing new things to keep me happy and delusional thinking I was ok, but because of the mystery illness (as I called it at the time), I made decisions and let things slide that I otherwise wouldn't have in other situations. I attribute the severity of my flare up to stress I was experiencing, but it was stress I was attributing to school when I should have been attributing it to my personal life. Hindsight is always 20/20, right?

So, fast forward again. I'm in the emergency room at Goleta Cottage Hospital at least once a week. I'm at the school health center at least one more time a week trying to fend off whatever cough, cold, or flu I have that day. I'm miserable. There is so much going on and my brain is so fuzzy all the time from the pain and exhaustion I'm experiencing. I see new doctors and "specialists" every other week, and I cry at every single one because it is exhausting. College is hard as it is. Explaining my life long battle with my body to a new doctor every few days just killed me, mostly because I knew they couldn't fix me. Nobody could. And nobody was trying. I don't know how things are supposed to work in the medical world, but I did not have a single doctor stick with me and try to figure out what was going on. I was fighting this by myself. I had my close family circle and friends at the time who knew what was going on, but I just didn't have the energy to tell everyone the full story. And that made me feel sad and isolated. Being on over 20 vitamins a day from different holistic doctors was too much for me to handle, but not taking them put me in even more pain. I felt stuck.

My first break in my case came when I read a story on google about mercury poisoning. I knew immediately that I had it, but so many doctors didn't believe me, and refused to even test me for it. Doctor Randall Neustaedter, a holistic doctor I'd been with for a few years who is based in Woodside, finally tested me for mercury poisoning. It came back positive. I was so relieved!! But that was just the beginning. We treated the mercury, but the bleeding continued. I brought my car to school with me some time in November, and that allowed me to go home on weekends and see Stanford doctors. Also in November, I began doing yoga to cope with stress. This was the beginning of my yoga journey.

Anyway, I thought I was going to need surgery, but thankfully I did not, which I will get to the "why?" of soon. I didn't get surgery in December of 2016, which I originally thought I was going to, because I wanted to go to Hawaii, and they said that if I took it easy and didn't bike (it was a bike trip), that I could go. So I went!

Fast forward again. This time to February. I kept losing feeling in my limbs when I would do everyday things. My feet would stay white, and I was so tired all the time that I would miss classes and meals because I couldn't make myself get out of bed. Back to google I went, having completely lost faith in western medicine at this point, and I gave myself yet another correct diagnosis. What was it this time?

Lyme's disease. I still have no idea how I got this, but it's supposedly gone now. So is the mercury poisoning I think, but I eat a lot of raw fish, so it's more hopeful than definite at this point. This time the Lyme was only caught because I BEGGED the new doctor that was taking other random blood tests to just take one more vial. I believe the exact words I used were “humor me”. Because I have to make my health a joke to be taken seriously in this world.

I have had more doctor's fingers in my butt in the last year than I should have in my entire lifetime. I've been forced to shit out barium- you heard me, barium, in front of a man and a woman so they can see watch me in an x-ray machine. I've had an MRI where they made me listen to maroon 5 radio in a tiny tube for 30 minutes and injected me with stuff to make my insides radioactively glow. I've had balloons blown up inside me to measure my pain tolerance or to see how my muscles react. I've had a physical therapist insist that giving me an internal vaginal exam would be what I need to fix my problem- while her fingers were in my butt. I just got up and went to the bathroom and cried and called my mom, and thank god did not go through with it because that is the most bullshit thing I've ever heard of. The first time a doctor put her hand inside my behind was in the UCSB student health center and she didn't even warn me. She said she just wanted to look to make sure I was okay, because I was bleeding, then before I knew it I was completely violated. That was the last time I went to the Santa Barbara health center for anything other than dayquil or aquaphor.

This whole process was completely dehumanizing. It's a unique thing to experience the sort of disappointment I did that came along with this story. I moved dorms three times last year. I switched dorms because of roommate issues the first time, then again because my room flooded. I went through a horrible breakup and I got diagnosed with three serious illnesses in the span of two months. I was touched too much, I cried too much, I was at the doctors too much.

But I am grateful for the experience, because it brought me here. It brought me closer with my amazing suitemates, Shawden and Elizabeth. I learned that I can, in fact, handle life on my own. I got to be a single lady in college for awhile. I got to go out with my girlfriends. I joined Alpha Phi and met even more friends, and my amazing big, Erika, and I got so much closer. I learned to lean on girlfriends and I took new classes and I tried new things. I jumped out of an airplane. I got healthy and I turned my negative energy that I was holding onto because of everything that was going wrong in my life and I turned it into something positive. I used it as fuel and I got into CorePower (hot yoga). I signed up for a 200 hour yoga teacher training over the summer, and I did it. And then I did another 50 hours. I found my best friend in a man named Quintin, and that best friend became my boyfriend, and that boyfriend has become my biggest supporter. He is one of a kind. He encourages me to do anything and everything that I can dream of. He makes me happy, and we take care of each other, even though he’s 1000 miles away.

I didn’t go back to Santa Barbara because I knew that my time there was over and that wasn’t where I was meant to be. I want to be a graphic designer and I was studying Communications. I also realized I hate Communications. The clouds from being by the ocean made me sad all the time, and there wasn’t a future there for me to justify going back. I’m going to be writing the next part of my story from somewhere in Colorado starting in January. Until then, I’m working at Lululemon and taking three classes online - typography, graphic design, and principles of marketing. I just started making yoga youtube videos because I don’t have any in person classes to teach right now, and I’ve made one bikini bottom since being home (it’s not exactly wearable though- another hobby I would like to practice more). I play with my dog, I hangout with my three friends that still live near me, and I want to try more new things with the time I’ve got. I’m focusing on me before diving back into school again.

While I seriously doubt that this is the end of my battle with my health, it is a turning point. I am a very different person than I was at this time last year. I have grown. I have learned. I have expanded. And I have healed. It is all a process, but it is also such a relief.

It’s now 11 o’clock at night so I’m going to go to bed, but it feels good to have put this out into the world. Let it do what it will.

Health and happiness,

Cameron