CRASH!

This year on June 17th I turned 35. I also had the worst adrenal crash I've experienced to date.

Over the last year and a half, I had slowly been regaining my energy. I was doing so well that I spent a whole day at the end of May helping my best friend move, and was totally fine!

I had several plans in mind for the summer- camping, paddle boarding, and hiking were all high on my priority list.

My body had other plans.

The day I crashed was a Sunday. The Thursday prior I had picked my husband and daughter up from the airport after a late flight. We probably got home around one in the morning. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I didn't sleep well at all and definitely didn't get enough hours of sleep.  When I woke up on Sunday morning I was exhausted. That day, our church was having its service at a local park, and I was supposed to give announcements. I knew when I woke up there would be no way that I could go that day, so I had to ask someone else to take over my emcee responsibilities.

The next several days after the crash I realized that I hadn't felt that level of exhaustion since quitting work. All of my previous crashes had been minor; I would overdo it one day, then be a little tired for 3-4 days. I would never go back to being exhausted, though.

In the previous year and a half, there were nights that I stayed up late and/or couldn't sleep, and there were plenty of nights that I didn't get enough sleep. I couldn't understand why the crash in June was so bad when I hadn't done anything drastically different.

The whole thing was disconcerting, to say the least. I started to obsess about what had happened. I tried to think of everything I had done that might have been a contributing factor, and there was nothing I could come up with.

I finally had this thought: there must be something else that's wrong.

Not knowing what else could be wrong, I tried to think about how I could figure it out. A few years prior I had got a postcard in the mail about a functional medicine doctor that sounded really good. I happened to think about them, and looked up their website. They had a package that included 4 visits and a bunch of tests up front. The more I read, the more convinced I was that I needed to go see them.

In my old job, I analyzed data sets for complex environmental sites. Over time, my team and I discovered that when you have more data and multiple people from different specialties looking at the data, you end up with a better idea of what's going on with the site.

It made sense to me that the same concept that we applied to environmental sites could also be applied to my body. With all the tests that were run up front, and with at least 2 different doctors in the same practice looking at the data, I figured I would get some answers!

 After talking to my husband about the functional medicine package benefits and costs, we decided to go for it (even though the office visits would be out of pocket).

I had one more visit with my old doctor two days before my first functional medicine appointment. It was hard to tell her that I was going to seek a second opinion and that I would undergo more testing. She seemed surprised but told me to do what I needed to. I'm glad that I had already booked the appointment with the functional medicine doctor- if I hadn't I may very well have just kept going in the same direction with the same doctor. The things she was telling me made sense, assuming I only had adrenal fatigue. I felt that perhaps I had overreacted a bit to the crash and that maybe I was going to waste a bunch of money going down a different rabbit hole.

It turns out I was correct in my thinking that there was more wrong than just the adrenal fatigue.

I just completed the third of four visits. I'll try and post about each visit individually over the next few days.