When I was young I never really thought about the fact that some day life stresses would catch up to me and help create various health problems. So, you can imagine that when I was told by a doctor that I had developed a heart problem I was rather in shock. At the beginning of summer this year I started noticing that I was extremely exhausted to the point where it was difficult for me to do general tasks of every day living. Throughout my entire life I have always worked extremely hard to care for my family and to provide for them, and now I felt like I was letting them down.
Each day that went by I got more and more exhausted and unable to function to the point where I had to put my young baby in daycare four days a week, so that I could recuperate. By the end of summer my situation had gotten so bad that I spent three days in the hospital to be evaluated by a specialist. At this point I was so depressed and downtrodden that I felt powerless with the entire situation. The doctors told me that I had bradycardia with an irregular heartbeat and while I was in the hospital my heartbeat got as low as 32 bpm resting and the average heart beat is anywhere from 60 bpm to 80 bpm resting.
The lack of blood flow to parts of my body made me go numb and had started causing my brain to become fuzzy, which caused me to develop some short term memory issues. The memory issues were due to the fact that my brain was not receiving enough blood to give it enough oxygen to function correctly. Even after all the doctors diagnoses they said they would have to see a marked drop in my blood pressure for them to install a pacemaker. So, in other words I had to get substantially worse before they would do anything to help me get better. As Jeremiah and I drove home and I began thinking about the reality of what they had said to me and I started to get extremely angry about the entire situation.
As I got angry and I started searching on the Internet to understand what I was going through in more detail it was there that I read some interesting things. First off the type of bradycardia that I have can be caused from a variety of reasons, such as an auto immune disorder, a heart valve dysfunction (which I do not have), or the most common (which I do have) is a problem with the electrical system of my heart. This electrical problem with the heart deals with the nervous system and it’s communication to the chambers of the heart. My heart beats irregularly and what that means atleast for me is that each chamber beats out of sync to the other and sometimes one chamber will beat twice to the other one.
As I read on I learned that the side effects of this are that one can exhaust easily, heart flutters, dizziness, shortness of breath, nausea, shoulder and neck and arm pain, fuzziness of thought and a short term memory issues to name the primary ones. At that point I had all of them and I must say that I was in absolute misery. But, as I read on further I also discovered some possible causes for the nerve damage. Some of the causes are autoimmune disorders, damage done by a possible impact or a blow to the chest most often caused by a car accident or physical contact that occurred during domestic abuse, extreme stresses related to traumas and PTSD related stress were also mentioned. Currently I do live with ulcerative colitis an autoimmune type disorder, in the last three years I did experience domestic abuse and was diagnosed with PTSD caused by that abuse.
Needless to say the reasons for my heart problem and why it happened were spelled out very bluntly in my research. Of course the truth of all of this made me even more angry and I eventually decided to take that anger and refocus its energies into getting better. This transmutation of the energies of my anger into “a dedicated focus to heal” helped me to find the people that I needed to in order to help my body to heal. After about a couple weeks of letting the reality of all these things that had occurred in my life over the last three years sink in I decided to get up and do something about it.
I decided to go to an acupuncturist instead of going the surgical route and it has been a choice that I am extremely happy with and has been like a healing miracle for my condition. Then I went on to get Reiki healing from my Reiki master teacher and to do Reiki on myself on regular basis. Furthermore I got rid of toxic energies out of my life by ending my participation with certain negative activities or individuals. I came to realize that my life and my health were far more important to myself and my family than keeping unhealthy activities, dead end relationships and or situations that only serve to make me ill.
Throughout the last couple years I have also done constant visits with a therapist to help myself to learn these and other healthy coping mechanisms, which has helped me greatly in this situation. During the last couple of years I have also used a chiropractor to help relieve body pain and stress as well as a massage therapist for the same purpose. Another thing I did was I started writing out my experiences, which for me is a form of emotional therapy that helps myself complete my healing process by finding closure. Throughout the course of sharing my life’s stories I have also discovered that my articles have helped hundreds of other people by showing them that they’re not alone in their problems.
Since I have chosen to do these healing art forms such as acupuncture, massage therapy, Reiki healing, chiropractics, emotional therapy and writing the quality of my life has drastically increased. Currently I am proud to say that I am down in weight by 25 pounds and my heart rate is now keeping an average of 65 to 70 bpm. Living through all of this helped me realize that first and foremost what I have or don’t have in my life can affect my health greatly. I also realized that I am not helpless and that in fact I am a very powerful survivor who has become a formidable warrior in my own life. So, my wish for everyone is to realize their power and become a warrior for their own personal health and to accept that everything one chooses to do and don’t do has an effect.
The truth is that it is possible to heal from almost anything as long as we are willing to put in the work and fight for it. Sure we may be left with scars, but those scars are a beautiful form of proof that ones body and mind are powerful and adaptable.
Until next time…
Namaste!
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