September 24, 2015 by Elizabeth Milo

Message to the doubters (warning: strong language).

Throw back Thursday. 3 years ago I was having an okay, if emotional, day. I met with my bosses to let them know I couldn’t go back to work, browsed a few shops next door for cards and then went to the dog park with my boys. I remember what I was wearing that day and the last photo I took that last time I went to the park: I was backlit by the sun, my shadow on the pebbles in the water as my dogs splashed around. I was listening to Radiohead and was so grateful for the warmth that day, so grateful for the energy to do these things. Since that day I have been housebound. It crippled me. It knocked me down so far, I never quite got up again. I haven’t met friends again, browsed shops or gone to the dog park alone again…

Rereading this blog post below makes me so sad. I really couldn’t believe that something this life-altering could happen to a person without any explanation or good medical advice. I couldn’t fathom living one more day, let alone a lifetime, with the pain and sickness. I wanted to die and, even though I disguised it with anger in this post, I got a lot of concerned messages from my family and back-peddled quickly, so they wouldn’t worry: “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m a fighter…”

But the truth is, as much as I wanted to live, I didn’t want to live like that. Every day over the next 16 months of relentless symptoms I thought I couldn’t go on and I’d rather die. The only thing that got me through was my mother and a few friends who were able to hear my desperation. Many people couldn’t hear it, it was too painful for them. But a few listened and didn’t say, “No, that’s not an option. Stop talking that way.” A few understood and reassured me that it was a totally rational response to my situation. And *for me* that made all the difference: To talk about it, to know I wouldn’t be alone with those thoughts or, if the time came, alone with that end game. “It’s an option, but not an option right now,” my friend Z. said. “Put it in your back pocket and keep it there. You need to try everything before you take it out and look at it again.” She saved me that day.

September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. Reach out. Whether you are suffering or you suspect someone is, please reach out.

Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

I’m happy to be alive today. I’m happy to not be in a hospital today. I’m happy to have the will to pull myself upright after about 24 hours of being horizontal and get this off my chest.

To anyone who thinks myalgic encephalomyelitis doesn’t exist because the TESTS don’t show anything wrong or some asshole somewhere couldn’t figure out what to call the thing that was happening to histrionic overworked ladies who couldn’t handle the pressures of modern society and decided it should be coined chronic fatigue syndrome, which would for evermore stigmatize the patients…. Fuck you.

Until you have what I have and until you go through what I go through, how dare you pass judgement or think you know better. What I have is killing me. It is ruining all quality of life and taking my family down with it. I’m not tired, I’m not in pain, I’m not…

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June 20, 2015 by Elizabeth Milo

June Update

It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy to write an update. As usual, I have a lot to document in terms of doctors and tests, but, overall, not much to report on my life and illness. My mother was here from Ireland this past week and that was, by far, the highlight of the last 4 months. 6 days seemed like 6 hours, though, and I’m left feeling a bit barren after her departure, like there are tumbleweeds blowing around inside my chest and hollow silence echoing against the inside of my skull.

I’m still housebound besides healthcare appointments and the odd dog walk on the scooter. I do think I’m marginally better than this time last year, though, which is heartening considering the horrendous ordeal of last autumn. Mostly, I think this because I’m walking more steps than I have since 2012. I regularly hit 2,000 on my pedometer, which does wonders for my mental well-being to think there is forward momentum. However, the flip-side is I have had more severe muscle pain and out-of-character joint aches. I am stiff in the morning and try to make myself put on compression stockings and a back brace if I’m going to stand in the kitchen for any length of time. I know I should scale back movement because, when I do, the muscle pain is better, but I’m really grasping onto that measurable progress for dear life.

There are other slight improvements. My sleep is still better than it was the first 3 years I was sick (although, I still don’t get much and it is plagued with fitfulness, nightmares and pain). My headaches, although they have resurfaced somewhat in the last month, were gone for a few months earlier this year, which is utterly life-changing. My resting face goes from this to this .

There are still, always, a lot of daily debilitating symptoms. For 3 full weeks after my birthday outing, I was not doing well. My flu symptoms came back and that always alarms me — chills, sore throat, extremely heavy muscles, pain. I also had a few bouts of the worst vertigo I’ve experienced since my tilt table test payback. One night it came on so quickly and viciously, I fell over and hit the floor on my way to the loo from bed. I was moaning out loud from the queasy out-of-bodiness, which is unlike me, and I was reminded again of Laura Hillenbrand and how unrelenting vertigo could possibly be the worst imaginable symptom.

Hair loss hasn’t stopped, but is better than last year. Or the short, choppy cut disguises it more. My eyes are their usual nightmare of blurriness and sore extraocular muscles, even though I am regimented about (gently) scrubbing the lashes and using preservative-free tears throughout the day. Tinnitus and skin are still bad, my neck is still banjaxed. I am still spending about 14-17 hours in bed each day. I guess that’s a bit better than last year.

Finally, there is no real change in my worst symptom: Brain Drain. Which doesn’t describe it. I’ve been trying to articulate this symptom for years — to doctors, to my husband, my mother. It’s not brain fog. What I call brain fog feels tired and cloudy, causes effort to recall and calculate things. My Buzzy Brain is like Stephen King’s The Long Walk: if you can imagine being made to walk until you physically drop, but then transfer that body feeling to the brain. The same way muscle exhaustion is physical, my brain exhaustion feels physical. My brain can’t take one more step to do anything. Can’t read, write, speak, hear. It comes on gradually, so I usually find myself wading through the quicksand of a conversation or article, slurring or rereading the same thing over and over. I get testy, dizzy, weighted down by head pain and then realise, Oh, duh, time to go to bed and stop everything. Not being able to push through the brain problems (just finish this sentence, this tv show, this meal) is much more depressing than not being able to push through the physical limitations. Take my body, just, please, leave my mind.

The outcome of this is nothing ever gets done. I never finish tasks and months slip by. I also never seem to get going on any plan of attack to conquer the myriad of abnormal test findings: candida, low immunoglobulins, high cholesterol, reactivations of viruses, methylation problems, high mycotoxins. There’s always a bigger fire to put out — the poisoned nocturnal reactions, the crashing blood pressure, the death of my bowel — before I can carefully address less acute problems, while tip-toeing through the minefield of menstruation mast cell instability. Although, given my track record, maybe the best treatment for my body is no invasive treatment at all, just lots of pacing, meditation, good food and the pursuit of laughter.

The few things on which I am actively working are my hormone deficiencies and my tanked thyroid (as per usual). Since last September, I have now quintupled my levothyroxine (T4) and tripled my liothyronine (T3) and nothing has changed. I’m spending an absolute fortune on compounded meds, hoping my body will absorb them better than the generic, affordable ones, but, so far, no dice. I will update soon about my new, wonderful endocrinologist and her thoughts (as well as my other doctor visits).

So, almost 3 years and 8 months sick and that’s where I’m at. If I could find relief from the social isolation and financial instability, there could be some sort of life here.

But, as it stands, I take my joy from the incredibly beautiful spring we’ve had here in Seattle and every opportunity to lie outside in the garden oasis my husband has created and see my dogs run in the park.

March 19, 2015 by Elizabeth Milo

March Update

I haven’t done an update in forever and it’s a shame because I look back on my updates a lot to see how I was in the past and compare it to how I am now. It looks like I’m at about the same level of functioning as I was at this time last year. A little worse, unfortunately. Last year, I was walking more steps, had been out in the garden more, was driving a bit (I drove to an appointment this week for the first time in forever, so there is some progress).

I’m still trying to regain some ground after the onslaught of nocturnal mast cell/viral/ME/inflammatory bowel reactions that started in September when I tried Cromolyn. Thanksgiving and Christmas were probably the two sickest nights of my life. As soon as I was resurfacing from Christmas, I got hit by another one on January 12th. As soon as I was feeling recovered from that, I had another one on January 28th and then again on the 31st. I stopped everything, including writing. For three weeks, I laid low and tried to reset my body. My constipation had become severe, so I had been taking massive doses of various different kinds of magnesium and I was afraid this was contributing to the episodes because there always seems to be some sort of bowel inflammation component involved (I get aches and what feels like electric pins and needles in my bowels and my flanks when I’m very constipated). When I quit magnesium, the constipation became critical — and a bit comical with the size of my protruding belly. I’m so uncomfortable, I wake up in the night when I roll over onto the poop baby inside of me. Where do the other organs go? I’m not sure how I continue to eat and I’m not sure why I continue to eat. You’d think at some stage I would just give my gut a break and eat liquid food, but I’m always hungry. I tried Triphala, Gentian, Medibulk, digestive enzymes, massage, enemas, prunes, oatmeal, even my old standby Wormwood stopped working. Which led me to the glycerine suppository on Oscar night which caused the (anaphylactic?) collapse on the bathroom floor. So, tonight I’ll be taking the generic polyethylene glycol (Miralax/Movical) that I have been avoiding because, if it’s too harsh, it’ll trigger a vasovagal reaction and I could pass out or, if it’s mild cramping, it’ll keep me up in the night. Not to mention it’s a nasty drug and probably made in China. But enough about that…

My father was visiting when the suppository episode happened and, a few days after he left, my mother came. That’s it from Christmas until now. That is my 2015. One quarter of a year summed up: reaction-recovery-reaction-recovery-reaction-recovery-reaction-recovery-visitor-visitor. Thank god for the visitors because the rest is really depressing. My friend M recently said that he fears not seeing those he loves ever again and, as we get older, that concern becomes more and more pressing. I think this all the time with my parents living so far away. Their visits allowed me to breathe easier. They filled me up with sustenance and gave me a little more mettle to carry on. I am incredibly lucky to have such a supportive and loving family. Recently, Jen Brea asked the ME community to post the most compassionate word or giving act ever received in relation to our illness (a very moving thread) and all I could think was, my family, my siblings, my parents, my best friends… their messages, words of encouragement, interest in learning about ME, physical help, monetary help, emotional help… Where would I be without them?

Both visits were wonderful and were needed more than I realised. My mother helped me with a hundred tasks I haven’t been able to accomplish and I got to hear all about my brothers and nieces and nephews, whom she had just visited. We managed to drive to the beach dog park twice: first, with my father and sister and, again, with my mother. It has been glorious weather in Seattle and getting out of the house is always the highlight of my months.

Yay! Beach!

Damn, he’s a fine looking dog. ❤

The one downside was, my husband wasn’t with us the first time, so I was without his deafening whistle and another set of eyes on our smaller dog, Riley, the escape artist. He ran around the rocks at the edge of the park and took off, causing me to expend more energy than I have in many months. I stood calling at the top of my lungs, over and over, “RILEY, COME!” and then started to panic when he didn’t reappear. At the top of my lungs and panic are not things that go well with ME. My voice is not strong, but, man, when my child went missing, nothing was going to stop me yelling for him. This is a dog that is only ours because he ran away from some other home and was found in a house barn, emaciated and unable to stand up. He’s an adventurer and curious about everything, while Bowie sticks to me like glue.

When Riley finally came into view, he was up in the car park and I sprinted up the sand embankment to the fence. Sprinted and up don’t happen in my world, either. Riley looked scared. He couldn’t tell where my voice was coming from and I was worried he’d run in front of a car or disappear, never to be found. He was tearing back and forth outside the park and I was calling over and over. He finally found me and I grabbed the scruff of his neck through the fence and sat down in the sand, waiting for rescue. My 72-year old Dad clambered up the rocks (cutting his shins in the process) and got Riley on a leash. I was half catatonic on the way home, like a rag with all the water twisted out of it. I crawled to bed, but, once again, bounced back quicker than I anticipated. And it was worth it. Mount Rainier on the drive home, through my glazed eyeballs, was spectacular. My Dad said it looked like a painting of Mount Fuji.

So, what else can I tell you about the last 3 or 4 months? I haven’t really taken any supplements this whole year so far. A few here and there, but, after every big episode, I would stop everything and go back to baseline. In the last week, I have been taking trace minerals, Vitamin D, K2 and fish oil again. I’m also still on topical DHEA and progesterone and just added topical pregnenolone and I’m about to add oral progesterone. It makes me nervous using bioidentical hormones, but they don’t seem to cause a reaction and both of my NDs recommend them, so I’m going with it. Apparently, there is evidence that DHEA+pregnenolone can reduce reactivity, so the goal is to take those for a while, then try IV fluids, then try sub-cutaneous IG and maybe even make my way to IVIG one day. I’ve been trying to get there since seeing Dr. Chia 7 months ago, so who knows how long it’ll take. I’m also still on the compounded thyroid hormones. All these compounded meds are costing me a fortune, though, and are not covered by insurance. One of these days, I’ll have to call this experiment quits and go back to my generic, dye-filled, filler-filled drugs. That’s it for what I’m taking. The Equilibrant, Nystatin, Hydroxyzine, Tramadol and Singulair are all languishing in the cupboard, unopened.

I had a few blood tests done in January. The big shock is that my cholesterol is sky high. Total cholesterol is 310, LDL is 194, Apo B is 124 (ideally <109) and LDL-P (particles) is 1755 (ideally <1000). There could be many reasons for this: my continuing low thyroid, my chronic and reactivated infections (coxsackie, HHV6, EBV, varicella, candida, mycoplasma pneumoniae), leaky gut and inflammation, genetics (both of my parents have high cholesterol) or something to do with my insulin/hypoglycemia issues. But, I actually think it is mostly to do with my diet. Over a year ago, I started an elimination diet for autoimmune conditions (AIP), plus cut out most high-histamine foods (fish, shellfish and avocado etc.). I cut out oats (I had already eliminated all other grains except rice), legumes, nuts and seeds, but continued to eat white rice (and rice cakes, rice pasta etc.). After about 4 months, I began eating a lot of ghee, butter and bone broth. I had my cholesterol checked in 2013 and it was fine, as it had been my whole life. In mid-2014, it had started to crawl up and, 9 months later, it’s now a pretty big problem. I’m pretty sure it was my inadvertent reduction in soluble and insoluble fiber (especially the former), plus the changes in the type of fat I was eating that caused the lipid problem.

Other January blood tests of note: low DHEA and testosterone (still), low insulin, high homocysteine (still) and my T3 and T4 are low (STILL). Don’t tell Dr. Erin, but I’m going to increase my liothyronine myself because these teeny incremental changes are just taking too long to fix my levels. Nothing seems to get better and more abnormalities keep emerging.

I’m averaging about 1,400 steps a day and 6 hours sleep a night. When I do sleep, my sleep has been better. I just put it together now that this might be because of the progesterone supplementation, which is meant to help restful sleep. Wow, I finally made a correlation. I still can’t wear the CPAP without all hell breaking lose and the oral appliance still wrecks my jaw, but I’m managing to get a solid 5 hours most nights, with another 1-3 tossy turny hours. I have my third sleep study tomorrow to see if the OA is helping the apnea at all. My other sleep issues (pain, night terrors, constant movement and muscle spasms, awakenings post-REM sleep) are still unresolved since I haven’t been able to tolerate the drugs offered.

My headaches have also been a bit better, maybe because I backed off the salt ever so slightly. I get doozies a few times a week, but I noticed that I didn’t really have a headache the whole time my father was here. My salt loading wasn’t helping my blood pressure at all, so I might need to be medicated.

My throat spot hasn’t been itchy in a while and I think the electric shocks in my left leg have been fewer and farther between.

I stopped using the Restasis after 4 months to see if I noticed any difference and I think my eyes have been worse since stopping, but I don’t know if they’re worse enough to justify a Rx.

Sore glands in my neck, crazy tinnitus, swollen sinuses are all continuous low-key issues lately. I started taking 5-6ml of liquid Zyrtec again a few weeks ago on a whim in case anything was seasonal allergy-related. As usual, I can’t really tell anything positive or negative.

My blood sugar seems better. This could be because I’ve diversified my diet (added back many nuts, seeds, oats, goat cheese, milk, potato, corn, chickpeas) and it also helps that my new endocrinologist explained that the danger lies more in how fast my blood sugar is dropping than how low it is. This was great to hear because I have experienced those sugar crashes where it can wind up in the 40s, but I was always nervous, if, when I was going to sleep, it was 73 or something, that it would continue to plummet in the night. She reassured me that, if I don’t feel the tell-tale shakes, it’s probably ok and I don’t need to eat. Having said all that, I got out of bed this morning needing to eat right away because I was shaky and it was 63, so it’s still a delicate dance. [<~ And, after I wrote that, I had a big blood sugar crash on my way out the door to PT because I didn’t eat meat for breakfast. I had to go back inside and cook a mound of lamb and a yuca cake and eat it in the car on the way there. I was 15 minutes late. I guess hypoglycemia isn’t really any better. Gah!]

My buzzy brain and neuro symptoms are definitely still here, always incapacitating when they hit, always signalling that I need to go to bed and power down. And I’m still stiff, inflexible, pulling muscles regularly, in some pain and pretty weak. My lower back has been a major issue recently and my husband bought me a back brace that I have to wear when I’m standing in the kitchen or I’m crippled.

My mood is fine unless I’m really sick or in a lot of pain and then I’m a scared, desperate caged animal, feeling like I can’t go on another minute. When I’m really sick in bed, feeling fluish, poisoned, inflamed and broken, the dark mental cloud descends and obliterates all hope and even the very rational thought that this will ease up. I don’t forget that it has eased up in the past – seemingly, it would be easy to reassure myself that it will again, but I can’t. It’s the knowledge that I couldn’t continue living if it didn’t ease up that causes the black blanket of fear.

But enough about that…

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The last time I was out on the scooter.

The bad news is, my scooter died at the end of December. It was my one lifeline to freedom and, although I only got out on it for about an hour each month, I lived for that hour. So, I have to figure out a way to get another. The best case scenario would be one that I could lift into my car myself. The cemetery is only a few blocks away and, ideally, I’d like to go for little outings without needing my husband and his truck, since he’s not home very much. I’m also thinking about the future when I have a smaller dog and will, I hope, have the strength to walk him on a leash using the scooter. Not sure there are any scooters that disassemble to light enough parts or that I would have the energy to put in the car, drive, take out and assemble, ride around for a bit, take apart and put back in the car, drive home, take out of the car again… Now that I see that in print, it seems a Herculean and impossible task. Plus, we can’t really afford one, anyway, when we spend more than we bring in every month. When we win the lotto, we can buy a scooter and a transport van that it can drive into. Or maybe I’ll just get better.

The good news is, everything is blooming and the smells in the garden are incredible. 🙂

This took me over a week to write, so apologies if it’s disjointed. Until next time… XO

September 1, 2014 by Elizabeth Milo

My Visit to Dr. Chia

Okay, okay, stop begging, I’ll tell you about my appointment with Dr. Chia. I can’t believe this took me so long to write, but I’ve been plugging away a little bit, day by day. I can save you some time and tell you straight away that it was not worth the trip. I don’t really feel like I learned anything new or found access to treatments I couldn’t have tried without him. That doesn’t mean I regret the trip, it just means, if someone else in my position asked my advice, I would say, “Save your money and your energy.” The journey, for me, became the challenge early on. I wanted to know if I could do it. I wanted to test my boundaries, I wanted to see if I could leave these four walls and find out just how bad the payback would be. It was also about testing a different location, spending time with my mother and giving my husband a break. So, I had a lot of different fuels feeding the engine, if you know what I mean and, without even one, I might not have made the trip. In the end, because I left early and Dr. Chia didn’t really give me anything, it was purely the challenge. And I’ve decided that is enough. It bolstered my confidence and reinforced how resilient I am — we are.

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With my mother outside Dr. Chia’s office.

Here’s what I thought about Dr. Chia before seeing him: I knew his son was sick with ME and recovered. I knew that Dr. Chia believes that enteroviruses are the root cause of this illness and that he has conducted studies that supported his theory, but the rest of the ME research community hasn’t taken up that torch and done bigger, better studies to replicate. I thought he would offer Equilibrant, his Chinese herb formula with which many people have had some success, and he might consider antivirals. My main impetus for seeing him was to get the testing that none of the other 40 doctors I’ve seen has done and also to see whether he thought I was a candidate for antivirals. Of course, I forgot to ask him about antivirals because I forget everything when I’m in a doctor’s office.

My mother holding the massive binder of test results that we carted down to California and then never opened.

My appointment was at 4:15pm on a Friday, so I was worried about rush hour and LA craziness, but Google maps was accurate and it only took us half an hour to get there. His office is in a nondescript brick building in a sort of strip mall in Torrance, CA. I’m a big fan of Stephen King and liked that the office was in an area named after the possessed protagonist of The Shining. 😉 The waiting room was barren. We (my mother and I) waited about 20 minutes and then went in and had the normal nurse stuff done. I noticed she wrote on my file that I was there about “chronic fatigue” and I mentioned that it was actually ME ~ or even write “CFS”. She said, “Well, it doesn’t matter because he only sees patients with your condition.” Sigh.

We waited probably about another 15 minutes for Dr. Chia and, when he came in, he was off like a rocket. He did not stop talking for an hour and 15 minutes. After about 10 minutes, he said I could record him, thank god, because I didn’t remember to ask and I have no memory of anything he said in those first few minutes. Dr. Chia was kind and pleasant. Not in any way intimidating or arrogant. I guess I would call him dogmatic without the ego. He seems slightly frustrated that nobody else realises enteroviruses are the root cause of so many chronic illnesses and told us many stories of other patients and studies that support his contention.

A few weeks before my appointment, I sent him a letter, a chronology of my health history and a list of my symptoms. He said that was extremely helpful and asked me very little in person about my illness, instead, he just ran down the list and discussed how my immune system had collapsed. I couldn’t help thinking none of this needed to be done in person since I was basically just a set of ears, but I know the law says I had to be there in the flesh. He also did a quick physical exam and neurological work up.

Here were his main points about my history:

As an infant, my immune system shifted into Th2 dominance with pneumonia and ear infections and asthma, which is an inflammatory disease. Instead of just fighting off infections with an increase in the Th1 branch of the immune system and then resetting back to equilibrium, mine shifted into Th2 and has been continually off kilter my whole life as it got hit by different viruses (bronchitis, ill while traveling in Central America, viral gastroenteritis from lake in Virginia etc. etc.). He gave an example of people who encounter the polio virus: just like the lake in Virginia, only a few out of hundreds exposed to polio will become crippled and the difference is the amount of gammaglobulin I (and others) have and my compromised immune system. He said enteroviruses are the second most common infection after the common cold and that viruses are often transmitted through water. He gave the example of Joseph Melnick at Baylor University who studied viruses that live in water from sewage contamination and spread to humans through shellfish, showers, colds and swimming. He also said the Russians wrote a paper that concluded the most common risk factors for contracting meningitis are swimming (30%), camping (20%), contact with sick people, and drinking well water.
Doctors repeatedly prescribed antibiotics for viruses and worsened my situation. The dark circles under my eyes are typical of this.
With Th2 dominance, comes allergies.
Night sweats are a classic sign of Th2 dominance ~ along with pain and sore throats, they are my immune system trying to fight off the viruses. But, “viruses are like weeds” and replicate exponentially. He said post-exertional malaise happens because activity causes viruses in the muscles to become metabolically active and replicate, causing pain. “The more activity you do, the more viruses replicate.”
Tonsillectomies are very common in ME because the body is fighting off the viruses and causing chronic sore throats (my early teenage years).
Vaccinations commonly cause ME and relapses (I took every vaccination I could get my hands on because I thought they were protecting me and didn’t realise they’re not for everyone).
He suspects a brain stem issue because of vasovagal syncope history, neck problems and dysautonomia symptoms.
He said that he has seen cases of ME caused by invasive dental work alone, so he thinks my history predisposed me, but having acute bronchitis, viral gastroenteritis, lots of dental work and then the flu shot all in the space of 3 months definitively tipped my immune system to ME. He said, “The flu vaccination is what did you in.”
My tender abdomen he said was my terminal ilium and that was typical with enteroviruses living in the wall of the small intestine.
He said I might have contracted new infectious illnesses in the past 3 years, but, whereas healthy people fight off viruses locally (i.e: facial symptoms with a cold), I fight it off systemically and all my ME symptoms flare. My mother and I heard loud and clear that contracting another virus would be incredibly dangerous for my recovery and my future health.
He said that there was a sewage leak into the lake at Incline Village in 1984, before the initial ME/CFS outbreak and that everyone got sick in the summer when they jumped in the lake. He said he is the only person in the US working on enterovirus research and he has found the virus in the blood and stomach lining of patients and has also done studies (injecting mice with enteroviruses and those that were initially immune deficient died). He said the CDC will soon be reproducing his work, he hopes.

Blood test results:

My T-lymphocytes are okay. CD4 is a little low.
Echoviruses, chlamydia pneumoniae, CMV, Creatine Kinase, IgA and CRP are all negative or within range.
Coxsackie B 4 and 5 are high. Type 4 is very high.
IgG (gammaglobulin) is low. All 4 subclasses. These are the most important antibodies to neutralise enteroviruses and maintain a healthy immune system.
HHV 6 IgG antibodies are very high.

Treatments:

He mentioned interferon, but said it is a very difficult treatment and short-lived.
He mentioned Epivir, an HIV drug that helps about 30% of the time, but didn’t want me to consider it now.
He told me to watch out for lakes, rivers, shellfish and not to drink the LA tap water.
He said I could try sublingual vitamin B12, coQ10, magnesium and vitamin D (all of which I take except B12).
The most important treatment he thought I needed was 5 – 15 grams of intravenous gammaglobulin to replace what I don’t have and modulate my immune system. He kept reiterating how much sicker I would be if I caught another virus, so he thought I should get IVIG twice a year and again whenever I travel anywhere (although, he said I probably shouldn’t travel). He wanted me to see an immunologist to get it, but it’s very expensive and the immunologist would want to inject me with a pneumonia vaccine to determine whether IVIG was necessary by my immune response two weeks later (I find this all very frustrating and wish that Dr. Chia could just give me a requisition form to take to a Seattle hospital so I don’t have to go through the rigmaroll of finding another specialist to determine that I need a treatment that this specialist says I need! It’s also frustrating because I won’t let a vaccine near me for the rest of my life and some random immunologist probably won’t take Dr. Chia’s word for it). If I can’t get IVIG, he said I should get 2 mililiters of intramuscular gammaglobulin, which will last for a few months.
He also gave me Equilibrant, his own proprietary blend of vitamins, minerals and herbs, and told us the story of his son’s recovery once he was taking 9 pills a day. He wants me to start on ¼ pill for a month, then move up to ½ for another month. I should expect an increase in my symptoms for 7-10 days. My problem with Equilibrant is that it has a bunch of fillers and crap in it: Dextrose, titanium dioxide, Yellow #5, Blue #2, Carnuba Wax etc. I still think I’ll try it, but I haven’t gotten the nerve up yet.

Honestly, the best thing he said to me during this whole appointment was, “You’ll get there.” He said since I’m so much better now than I was last year, my body is recovering and I just have to try to avoid getting another virus. After hearing Dr. Peterson say that he has never had a patient recover, it was nice to hear Dr. Chia say that I would get there…. I know “there” will not be where I was pre-ME, but I’ll take pretty much any there over here.

August 9, 2014 by Elizabeth Milo

The Other Shoe.

Whereas my preparation for this trip was incredibly thorough (I will write a post on that later) and the journey down to California went off without a hitch, once we got there, things went a little sideways.

I’d never been to LA and it was a learning curve. I’m very grateful that my therapist warned me about the vastness of the area and I had a few friends on which to rely for info (Patrick and SGV, I’m looking at you). For example, I was told to look at Palos Verdes, which is a bluff above the city, overlooking the ocean. I thought it must kind of be like a bigger Queen Anne in Seattle, a neighbourhood on a hill. However, Palos Verdes has 4 towns on this hill. There are multiple airports in LA and they are all legitimate, proper airports. I know that sounds silly, but, in Dublin, there’s Dublin airport, in Seattle there’s SeaTac and some landing strips. I like to say, in Seattle it takes about half an hour to get anywhere — give or take 10 minutes. A childhood friend of mine lives in LA, but she lives hours away from where I was staying, to see her would practically be a planned road-trip. They are obvious differences — it’s a huge city, after all — but I needed to make a mental shift that I never did in London or New York, for example.

Anyway, I was told that the heat and air quality in LA were awful — refineries sit very close to Dr. Chia’s office and stagnant air plagues the whole inland city. I was also warned of mold issues in beach areas. I was treating this as an 8-day retreat with my mother, whom I see rarely, a week to let my husband have some alone time and a test away from my home and dogs for the first time since I got sick. I was concerned about picking a rental in an area that made it difficult to sit outside. I imagined languishing in an air-conditioned house the entire time, with the garden being too hot and acrid and my being too sick to venture out to a different area.

(Aside: I had a few people suggest things I should do in LA ~ go to the beach, see the glass chapel ~ and it baffled me that they thought I’d be able to manage things after a grueling journey that I can’t manage when I’m at home resting. People can never fully grasp how limited we are, even people that see us, know us, live with us. They can never know the constant tally of energy expenditure versus energy conservation that goes on in our brains. The almost-subconscious weighing of necessity, desire and payback. The ever-present knowledge of what we’ve done that day and what we still need to do before bed that dictates our every word and movement.)

So, I found an AirBnB rental that was in Rancho Palos Verdes. The host was extremely nice, said it was quiet, there was no mold and they rarely had to turn on their A/C. It was about half an hour from the airport and 25 minutes to Dr. Chia. As we drove up the hill, the temperature dropped from the high 80s to the high 70s; it was perfect. The house was beautiful, with an expansive view of the ocean and it was sunny, but not too hot. I rested in the garden and watched the sunset, drinking up the view, so deeply submerged in gratitude, I thought it might overwhelm me. I never thought I’d be anywhere but Seattle again. Honestly, I thought I might not be anywhere but my house again. It was at once completely foreign and very familiar. I was taking in every scent and colour like an alien in our world, but it also felt completely normal, like the past two years were only two weeks and I was navigating just another part of the earth, like I have so many times before.

Then the other shoe dropped. Huge, billowing rolls of fog came in off the ocean and the humidity shot up and the temperature dropped. The damp soaked into my bones and gave me a chill that never really went away.

The fog rolling in.
In person, this was huge ~ the photo can’t do it justice.

I went back into the bedroom to rest and it reeked. It was like walking into a wall of mildew. The en suite bathroom had no fan and the shower head couldn’t be turned to stop the water from spurting all over the floor. The closet was moldy, the duvet was musty and the blanket was crusty with something spilled on it. There was more, like stained pillows, toilets backing up, dirty dishes in the cupboard, moldy food in the fridge, a filthy oven, loud construction in the lot next door, but none of that bothered me like the smell of the back rooms and bathrooms. Even my husband, whose nose doesn’t work as far as I can tell, commented on how bad the bathroom was. The whole house felt damp and heavy. Between 7pm and 11am, the humidity never dropped below 78% and the temperature was in the low 60s. I didn’t have very many warm clothes with me, but I put them all on. Every day, I would sit on the couch, wearing three layers of clothes, and wait for the first beam of sunlight to break through the clouds and then go out to that spot and bake myself, like trying to dry out a water-logged book. The day we left, the humidity was 96% and it was completely overcast. That’s, like, raining indoors.

RPV bedroom on the left, my room at home on the right (humidity on the top, temperature in Fahrenheit on the bottom). I’ve never been so happy to be back in Seattle dryness in my life.

After much deliberation, we decided to leave early. I was fine for those few hours that the sun was up and I could be in the garden, but with the forecast calling for a chance of rain and even more clouds, I had to get out. My breathing felt heavy and I didn’t know what I was inhaling while sleeping in that room, so I didn’t have a “safe” place to lie and rest. So we changed our tickets for the evening flight the day after my Dr. Chia appointment. There were only two flights a day out of Long Beach Airport and the morning would be too difficult on my system. If I don’t rest in the mornings, eat properly, poop properly, hydrate and salt properly, I tend to have crashes of one sort or another: blood pressure, blood sugar, weakness etc.

Note to self: don’t choose the last flight of the night when you are sick, in a wheelchair and on a special diet.

Our flight was scheduled to depart at 7:25pm, which was already pushing it because I wouldn’t get home until around 11pm, well past my bedtime. We were told the flight was delayed at around 7:15pm — there was engine trouble and a mechanic was coming to take a look at it. Of course, I knew immediately it would be canceled and it was the last flight to Seattle that night. They could have moved quickly and gotten us to LAX for one of a number of nonstop flights to Seattle, but, instead, we waited over two hours to be told at 9:30pm that the mechanic had finally arrived. My husband actually had us transferred to a flight leaving out of LAX at 8:55pm, but we wouldn’t have been able to make it there in time. Actually, we probably wouldn’t even have been able to get my suitcase in time. We asked about getting a hotel and were told there were no open rooms in the city. No hotel rooms in the whole of LA. Hhmm. By then, I had finished all the food I had brought for the flight (not much: carrots, cucumbers and a bunch of Terra vegetable chips) and was curled up with my feet on a chair and my head on the wheelchair, feeling woozy and slurry. Through all of this, my heroic mother stood in line to talk to a gate agent with the throngs of other people and did everything she could to fix the situation.

I had already spent a lot of time on my phone looking for a hotel to no avail, but I didn’t trust my efforts, so I asked my husband to help from Seattle (he had only come to L.A. for two days to drive and help get us settled). He texted me three motels that he found through Expedia, but we didn’t know if they were places that Alaska Airlines would refund, plus my mother still was holding out hope that the engine would be fixed, so we held tight.

The little engine that couldn’t.

When we finally got word that the flight was canceled, I wasn’t in the best shape. Two of the places my husband had found were now full and the last one was a $60 motel in Anaheim, charging $657 through Expedia. In desperation and delirium, thinking the airline would reimburse us, I booked it. And, when I called to tell them we were on our way, got thoroughly spooked by the very shady sounding person who answered the phone and seemed half drunk and not the type that should be in charge of a motel. Or even, of operating a phone. I had a meltdown. We were the last ones in the terminal, maybe in the whole airport. Everyone else had, presumably, gone back to their friends’ or family’s homes. My mother was busy begging the gate agent to help us since I was so ill and needed to get home. They offered to call the paramedics for me. People with M.E. love emergency rooms. I said, “If it’ll guarantee me a bed with no doctors bothering me, sure.” My mother said, “She’s not that kind of sick; it’s a chronic illness.”

They told us there were no seats on any flights the next day. I melted down a little further. The gate agent said we could fly out of LAX at 7am or John Wayne Airport at 12:30pm. We chose John Wayne because it was closer to the Anaheim dive that I was trying to get the nerve up to go to, but we couldn’t get the disabled bulkhead seating and we couldn’t get two seats together. Then my husband texted that there had been a mechanical glitch in Expedia’s system and my shady motel reservation didn’t exist. Oh, thank god! Because I had already realised Alaska would not be refunding any $657 for a dump in a different city. But… that left us with the airport floor to sleep on. Melting down…

My sister, A, who was on a camping trip in Eastern Washington with no cell phone service had asked if she could help. So had my friend, Z, who was probably asleep after working and caring for her baby all day. I didn’t think there was any hope. I had tried (ineptly) to look online, my husband had tried from Seattle, the gate agents had tried every contact they had… even the airplane crew was stranded at the airport.

At 10:41pm, my sister dropped what she was doing with her friends to help me, but I knew it was hopeless. I had a a new fun symptom develop around this time: my voice started coming haltingly, words coming out broken. It sounded like I was having a bad neurological problem, staccato speech, each syllable coughed out separately and slowly. It scared me. The incredibly kind and empathetic gate agent helped us get my suitcase and then wheeled it upstairs so my mother could push my chair. She showed us a couch where I could sleep and got us water. I got out my pillow, sheets, eye shades and ear plugs and texted my sister that I was done, signing off.

That was 11:22pm. At 11:52pm, she texted to say she had found a room in a hotel — not a motel — for $164 — not $657 — across the street from John Wayne Airport — not in Anaheim or Palmdale, which is where the plane crew eventually found a room, 1.5 hours away. How could it be possible? I called the hotel: “Do you really have a room? For two of us? Even if it takes an hour to get there??” “Yes, Elizabeth, I talked to your sister, it’s all ready for you.” Disbelief.

We packed up and — another angel restoring my faith in humanity — a woman also sleeping in the airport helped wheel our suitcases downstairs and outside the airport. Everything was deserted. The airport was effectively shut down. Tumbleweeds. And, then, as we were searching for a taxi number, one pulled up to drop someone off. Heaven sent. $75 later, we got to the hotel, they had a wheelchair for guests and a man helped us to our room. It was gorgeous. Two beds, a big balcony, swimming pools… By 1:30am, I was in bed. It was glorious. My sister moved mountains from the middle of nowhere and I will never be able to thank her enough.

I didn’t sleep very much, of course, but I was able to recover more than I could have in the airport. My voice went back to normal, although I woke up nauseous, shaking like a leaf (not blood sugar) and with odd heart tremors. I mentioned how I felt on Facebook and Erik Johnson, of extreme mold avoidance fame, answered: “Take a shower. Wash your hair extremely well. Change into completely different clothes and put the ones you are wearing in a plastic bag.” It was like someone slapped me upside the head. Of course. I am in the habit of not showering in order to conserve energy, but showering is the only way to decontaminate — if not toxic mold spores, at least airplane germs and travel stank (from which I was definitely suffering). So I showered and changed into the only other clothes I had: a fun mix of compression stockings, shorts, tank tops and pajamas. I drank a salt and potassium water and was good to go. The shuttle to the new airport took about 3 minutes (again: how did my sister do it? Right across the street!) and the flight home was uneventful. My body even cooperated having only survived on plantain crackers, Rice Chex and vegetable crisps for 24 hours. And my husband greeted me at the airport with chicken and kale bone broth. Liquid life force.

Home is where the broth is.

Although I don’t think the journey to see Dr. Chia was worth it (as in, I wouldn’t advise someone else in my situation to go — but more on that in my Dr. Chia post to come) and the rental was not ideal and the journey back was filled with Travel Worst Case Scenarios, I don’t regret the trip at all. I didn’t feel terrible after either flight. I thought they might be carrying me from the airplane and that I might spend days in bed with my meningitis-type symptoms in full flare, but that wasn’t the case. I was actually just fine. The worst I’ve felt since before I left is the last three days and I don’t even know if it’s payback from the trip because it’s so delayed. It could be something in my home. It could just be M.E.

The whole expedition cost a small fortune and it was too much planning, packing and mental gymnastics for the few short days we were there, but I did it. We did it. My mother and husband were unimaginably brilliant and took every precaution to make it successful. And now we know how to do it, if we ever have to again. And I got to spend time with my Momma and create new memories. Priceless.