The Change That Changes Everything (Part 1)

This morning I hiked 8 miles. 

Last month I took a family trip to Vermont...  riding in a car… for 14 hours over the course of two days… 

Neither of these things is really all that remarkable, unless you consider the fact that, a few short months ago, I would never have been able to do either of them. 

Every morning of my life, for at least the past decade, I had awakened with varying levels of chronic, unexplained pain… climbed slowly out of bed onto painful ankles and feet… hobbled gingerly across the room, unable to fully straighten up until I’d been moving for at least 5 or 10 minutes. My knees hurt. My lower back hurt. My hips hurt. My wrists and elbows and shoulders hurt, and my fingers felt stiff and swollen and painful. A terrible band of aching "nervy" pain across my mid back would intensify over the course of the day—every day—until I would hit some point in the late afternoon and have to soak in a bathtub… or have a back rub… or take some medication… just to make it to the end of the day. I regularly had migraine headaches, which would land me flat on my back in excruciating pain, hiding away in darkness and silence until things passed over the ensuing hours or days. 

I tried everything I knew how to—and I ended up having spent tens of thousands of dollars on every idea and possible solution that both conventional allopathic and alternative medicine supposedly had to offer. (I'm not exaggerating here!) I’ve seen MDs, PAs, DOs, orthopedists, chiropractors, naturopathic doctors, physiatrists (pain management doctors), physical therapists, massage therapists, myofascial release therapists. I had complete allergy testing, hormone profiles, bloodwork, X-rays, MRIs, CTs. I tried ice packs, heating pads, water jet therapy, acupressure, trigger point injections, dry needling, prolotherapy, essential oils, CBD products, a TENS unit, an inversion table, analgesic patches, micro-current therapy, steroids, cortisone shots, NSAIDs, opioids, neurological drugs like gabapentin, and experimental drugs like LDN that had to be filled at special compounding pharmacies.

I suppose the point of sharing this litany of symptomatology and attempted treatments is to make it clear that, by the end, I was in terrible pain… and that I had spent considerable time, money, and effort—over many years—to get to the bottom of it and to attempt to find relief. But my pain only increased, slowly but surely, as the years went by. 

Several years ago, when my pain was constant but still relatively mild, I heard about a childhood friend of mine, younger than I, who had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in her 30s. Her illness had progressed to the point that she was walking with crutches, at times wheelchair-bound, unable to walk unassisted or go up and down stairs. Her mother is a dear friend of mine, and she had shared about how her daughter had tried a new dietary protocol... having slowly and gradually found relief over many months. She was now, a year and a half later, fully mobile and functional, with no pain at all. I rejoiced with her mother as she shared this story of healing, and I asked for the name of the book she had used to guide her in her new eating protocol. I was told there were several, but to start with Fasting and Eating for Health by Joel Fuhrman, MD. I promptly ordered the book online and read it immediately. 

“Well, this can’t be right,” I remember thinking as I read it, realizing—however many pages in—that he was advocating a meat-free diet. I had traveled through many paradigm shifts in my understanding of "healthy eating" over the years, and I had eventually landed on a philosophy that advocated a diet of mostly home-cooked foods that included home-baked whole grain breads and sourdough, raw milk obtained through a cow-share program with a local dairy farmer, grass-fed beef and free-range chicken and other high-quality meat products, free-range eggs from local chickens, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, homemade cultured products like kefir and kombucha and yoghurt and sauerkraut. We were healthy eaters, I thought, and certainly not consuming the "standard American diet" (SAD). I finished the book, put it away on a shelf (literally and figuratively), and continued about my life. 

Fast forward several years, and my pain was now debilitating. I was desperate for answers, and I was out of ideas where to turn. The pain was present all over my body, in all my joints, and I was pretty much convinced that I must have rheumatoid arthritis. I made an appointment with the most-recommended rheumatologist  in my town and had a full blood work-up. After a couple of weeks, the results came back. 

“Do you want the good news first or the bad news first?” she asked me. 

“I don’t know,” I remember answering, bracing myself for the worst. 

“You do not have rheumatoid arthritis. (Pause.) That’s the good news and the bad news. You do not have any of the autoimmune disorders that usually lead to this kind of pain… no RA, no lupus, nothing of the sort. Your bloodwork is normal.” 

I remember feeling tears spring immediately to my eyes, spilling over onto my cheeks then trickling down to my chin and dropping off onto my chest. And they were not tears of relief, either… though of course I was thrilled not to have rheumatoid arthritis! But at least it would have been an answer. A diagnosis—that ever-elusive thing that all folks in unexplained chronic pain seek—would at least have a new protocol and regimen attached to it, which might offer some hope of doing something… anything… to try to fix the terrible pain. 

But alas, no. I was being sent to a physiatrist… a pain management doctor… the place where they send you when there’s nowhere else to send you… when they’ve stopped trying to diagnose you because they’ve given up hope that they’re going to find anything fixable and are just trying to help you manage the discomfort by a variety of means, all of which I’d already tried. I was devastated. 

I came home. Cried. Prayed. Talked to my husband. 

Then I went to see the physiatrist. Again. (I’d first seen her almost twenty years ago.) She put me on drugs, which I took… and sent me to physical therapy, which I did… and did injections, which I suffered through… and told me to go on a gluten-free and dairy-free dietary trial for 6–8 weeks, which I balked at. 

“No,” I informed her. “My daughter’s wedding is three months away, and I am going to eat the food at her reception.” 

She told me to start the restricted eating that very day—and to complete the trial before the wedding—and so I did. I went gluten- and dairy-free for eight weeks in early 2020, just at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic during which my daughter had a modified outdoor beach wedding with a few family and friends. We had to shift gears and change plans and modify everything several times, and it was a terribly stressful and challenging time. 

We all have our memories of those early pandemic days, full of uncertainty and fear and sacrifice… the loss of dreams (and modifications of plans) that accompanied those difficult times. Did the gluten-free, dairy-free trial during that time take away my physical pain? No, it did not. 

Did it help at all? I feel certain it must have—at least a little—since I was navigating those dark days of <plan, grieve, re-plan, grieve, shift gears, plan again> with some measure of success and functionality, handling the added stress and workload better than I would normally have handled the "regular" days of my usual life. And the massage table in my bedroom had been put away. This symbol of my pain—the near-daily necessity of a back rub just to be able to get to sleep without drugs—had been put away during the wedding days because it was taking up a lot of room and wasn’t needed every day anymore. 

The wedding came and went. The GF/DF eating came and went. I ate the food at the reception. I ate the food at the family reunion beach week that followed. Then I returned home to my usual diet and my usual life. Slowly, ever so slowly, the pain began to increase again. The massage table came back out. The back rubs and bathtub soaks and CBD massages all returned, just to get me through the painful days. I fidgeted around the idea of going GF/DF again, but I really didn’t want to do it. It was terribly inconvenient and unsatisfying, and a real nuisance to pull it off. And it hadn’t actually alleviated my pain. It had helped a little, maybe… but was the little bit of relief worth the whole lotta pain-in-the-butt of eating gluten- and dairy-free? I wasn’t so sure. 

Then I remembered my friend with rheumatoid arthritis, Rachel. I called her mom back—several years later now—and asked her about the eating regimen she herself was on… about exactly how she had applied the dietary protocols she had voluntarily taken on several years earlier in solidarity with her daughter, when her daughter had begun the eating plan that forms the basis for my new way of eating. 

I didn’t know at the time that it was really a conglomeration of the practices of several doctors and practitioners, each with a slightly different twist on what is fundamentally the same recommendation—an eating plan known as a whole food, plant-based diet. And so began my eating adventure... and the beginning, for me, of the change that changed everything.

Read Part 2, A Reluctant Herald.  

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