You know your body best when feeling unwell. Keep advocating for yourself to find practitioners that can truly help you. Looking outside of the medical profession into alternative healing may give you the answer you truly need.

Tenesha Wards is a functional medicine doctor. She personally healed from Lyme disease, the Epstein Bar virus, and Hashimoto. From her training with top doctors in the U.S. and her personal experience, she treats her patients holistically.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Erika:

I share with you the power of self-knowledge, exploring your hidden physical and mental health potential. I'm eager to share how I'm healing from chronic Lyme disease as I interview helping professionals. I share my journey because now more than ever collectively, we are suffering from chronic inflammation, fatigue, and anxiety. I provide reasons why and how to thrive once again. This episode marks the beginning when Dr. Tanesha Wards asks me questions about my persistent and mysterious symptoms. Listen, as she asks me questions about my symptoms that finally lead to an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment.

[00:00:54] Tenesha:

“I think telling your story, very powerful and thank you for sharing it, can help people get a diagnosis sooner and get help sooner versus suffering for decades. And if we can do that for one person, I think it's worth telling your story a hundred times. Erika, your journey has been long, and your story goes back deep. Why don't you start from the beginning and kind of tell us what your symptoms were, what drug you in the doctor's offices to begin with?

[00:01:48] Erika:

From 2009 to about 2017, I was super busy with my private practice as a counselor, teaching meditation and yoga. Doing events and workshops. I did a business mindfulness training for executives and juggling basically two businesses at the same time.

[00:02:08] Erika:

Raising a pre-teen, and boom, I just started spiraling down and I got to the point where I couldn't sleep. and that was, like so uncomfortable and I didn't understand why I was having so much difficulty. It went on for about six months. I just kept saying to my husband, I don't feel right. I don't feel right. I can't even function, but don't even want to leave the house. And that's not my personality. I like being out and doing things, but I didn't know how I was going feel. It was awful.

[00:02:47] Tenesha:

I would call this section in your life kind of a busy mom syndrome section, right? Running a practice, a second business, you know, pre-teen, which should be manageable, right? Like if we should ourselves, right? That should be manageable to an extent. But you felt something was not right and it wasn't manageable.

[00:03:08] Erika:

No. And it kept getting worse and worse and worse. Eventually, it was Thanksgiving of 2017, and I remember laying there and trying to go to sleep and I said to my husband, David, I cannot do this one more night. I'm just laying here feeling agitated, feeling sick, and not getting any rest. I know that if you don't get enough sleep, you start to hallucinate, which I wasn't quite yet, but I was on the verge of just like, what is reality? And I asked him, I begged him to take me to the hospital and he wouldn't. And I think there was some denial there and not wanting it to be as bad as it really was. And I called my mom, she took me straight to the hospital. And they said I had an anxiety disorder and insomnia.

[00:03:55] Tenesha:

They might not have been wrong. You hit a place of delirium when you're not sleeping. Think of that movie Fight Club. Like you hit a place of what's reality and what's not. I hear that a lot from my patients with specifically with Lyme and mold. When they can't sleep, they get into a twilight state. Yes....