I was supposed to be writing to you about gluten this week. Instead, I went to the ER. So, minor editorial change.
Last Monday, my neck started hurting. At first it was annoying. Nothing particularly exciting. I assumed I slept weird, tweaked something, needed to move around a little. You know how necks are.
Except it kept getting worse. Like A LOT worse.
Then my upper back joined in. Then my left arm. Then basically the entire left side of my upper body started having these absolutely insane muscle spasms.
And now, a week and a day later, we’re still very much in it. Actually, that’s still happening as I’m typing this now, so I keep writing a word with extra letters that the spasms are making me write and then having to delete those. This is pretty comical if you could see me.
Anyway, when I say painful, I mean stop-me-mid-sentence, lose-my-breath painful. I am not embarrassed to say I've cried multiple times. For some context on my personal pain / medication threshold, I had abdominal surgery and took not even a single Tylenol or Motrin afterward. I know I’m crazy and that was probably dumb. Point being, this was WAY worse.
And then Tuesday morning at around 4 AM, things got a little more interesting. I got up to use the bathroom and suddenly started sweating profusely. I got dizzy. I was seeing stars. And standing there in the bathroom I thought, 'Sh*t, I hope this isn’t a heart attack.'
I know I’m low risk right now, but I already had all of this left-sided pain, and as an RN — and someone who spends an awful lot of time talking about women’s health — I know women don’t necessarily present with the classic movie-version heart attack symptoms. Left shoulder or arm pain can be a telltale sign along with dizziness + sweating.
I called out for my husband. Except only this tiny little voice came out, so he didn’t hear me.
I laid down. The neck / back / arm pain did NOT let up. But the sweating, dizziness and seeing stars did, which was reassuring.
Then I did the extremely sensible thing and waited another 28 hours before going to the hospital. I kept thinking it would turn a corner. It did not turn a corner.
By Wednesday morning, the spasms were still out of control and the pain was unlike anything I can remember experiencing.
First I considered urgent care, but I had a feeling they’d send me to the ER anyway and since I like to save time and copays, ER it was.
Then they did a CT of my cervical spine. It showed some degenerative changes, which basically means there are wear-and-tear changes in my neck.
It also showed stenosis in a few spots, which means narrowing of the spaces around parts of the spine, including where nerves travel. Also, a bone spur.
Those findings don’t automatically explain what happened to me last week, but they were some early clues.
People can have degenerative changes, stenosis, and even a bone spur on imaging and have no symptoms. And those changes didn’t suddenly develop last Monday morning.
There’s also another weird thing about my neck that I’ve known about for more than 20 years. A normal cervical spine has a gentle curve called lordosis. Mine basically doesn’t. I was rear-ended in a car accident when I was in college, and imaging afterward showed that I’d lost that normal cervical curve. My neck is much straighter than it’s supposed to be.
So there was already some stuff happening anatomically before last week’s festivities.
The CT gave us information, but CT also has limitations. It doesn’t give us the same look at discs, nerves, the spinal cord and other soft tissues that an MRI can. So right now we know more, but we don’t necessarily know exactly what caused THIS.
If you missed my original post about all of this, I shared more of the play-by-play over on IG here. I had another appointment on Saturday, but we weren’t really expecting answers from that one. It was more of a stepping stone to the next few appointments and imaging we’re trying to get lined up.
Unfortunately, we’ve also hit a couple of insurance hiccups that are affecting the timing of some things. We’re working on those (my husband is amazingly helpful) so we can hopefully expedite things and get some actual answers and a plan soon.
I unfortunately cannot turn my brain off, so I have a running list of differential diagnoses going. We’re starting with the things that seem most likely — right now, a structural / nerve compression situation is pretty high on that list. The weird part is that my symptoms don’t follow just one dermatome, so there could be more than one level involved in my cervical spine, the brachial plexus could potentially be part of the story, or there may be more than one thing happening here. We’ll start with the more obvious possibilities and keep working our way through the list if those don’t pan out. I’m not going to stop looking until I understand what’s going on. So many of you have sent me texts, DMs and comments with your own experiences or things to consider — I really appreciate you. I’m reading them and taking things into consideration.
In the meantime, I own a pharmacy (which is funny, because I can go literally five years without taking a single medication). Yet within a few days I’ve accumulated steroids, muscle relaxers, anti-inflammatories, lidocaine patches, gabapentin.
Quite the pivot on the meds, huh?
This is also a really good example of something I think gets misunderstood about holistic health… or at least MY version of holistic health.
I’m not anti-medicine. I am incredibly grateful medicine exists. I’m just a 'least intervention necessary' person.
Sometimes the least intervention necessary is sleep, food, movement, time, physical therapy, stress management, supplements, sunshine, fresh air, whatever makes sense for the situation.
And sometimes the least intervention necessary is SURE I’LL TAKE THE DRUGS BECAUSE SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE.
This is that.
My holistic side hasn’t disappeared, either.
I’m still thinking about supporting my body best as reasonably possible while we’re trying to get this under control. Some supplements are staying on purpose, some taking a back seat for my poor liver + kidneys to have more bandwidth to process all the meds, red light therapy, nutrition, positioning, heat, etc.
I’m also paying attention to things like taking medications with food when appropriate for stomach care, not taking more than I need simply because I technically can, resting, eating enough to support recovery, and overall just trying not to make an already angry situation angrier.
Food looks a little different around here right now, too. I shared what feeding myself well looks like when I’m basically couch-bound, a lil nauseous from meds and definitely not interested in cooking over on Instagram here.
It’s not particularly glamorous. But getting enough food in, prioritizing protein + fiber where I can, and making this as easy on myself as possible is the assignment right now.
This is what holistic health looks like to me ... it’s not conventional medicine on one side and everything else on the other, and we all pick teams. It’s understanding the tools available to us and using the ones that make sense for the situation we’re in.
And no, I’m abso-freaking-lutely NOT working out right now. I know somebody is wondering. My weights aren’t going anywhere. I’ll gradually return to training when my symptoms and the medical information tell me that makes sense. Missing the amount of workouts I've missed so far will not erase the muscle I’ve built. If this lasts a bit longer, I will lose muscle. But not without a fight -- enough food, enough protein, and omega 3s are things that can help slow that down while I'm basically couch-bound.
Ironically, our new workout programming started yesterday inside The Metabolic Edge, so I know a bunch of you are going strong with it right now. I’m doing it with you in spirit. 😂 And hopefully I’ll be actually doing it with you sooner rather than later, but we are definitely not there yet.
So for now, I rest. I work from the couch. I homeschool from the couch. I take the meds I need. And I wait for appointments and more information.
Which brings me back to the newsletter I was SUPPOSED to be writing you…
Gluten.
I was planning to do a deep dive on gluten for you this week. I had already started putting it together, and then my cervical spine decided we were changing the editorial calendar.
I’m going to try to get back to that one soon because there is SO much I want to talk about. What gluten actually is. Celiac disease versus non-celiac gluten sensitivity. What we know about intestinal permeability. What we don’t know. Autoimmunity. Hashimoto’s. Nutrient absorption. Who might have a reason to experiment with removing gluten, who probably doesn’t, and why I’ve never been an “everyone should stop eating gluten” person.
There is a LOT of nuance there.
That’s also why these deeper newsletters take me some time to put together. I put together what I know, cross-check, tell you where the evidence is strong, where it’s messy, and (try to) translate all of that into something you can actually use.
I hope you’re enjoying these deeper ones!
I do try to sneak some shorter newsletters in between because I recognize that not everybody wakes up on Tuesday morning hoping I have sent a big ol’ research paper to their inbox.
I tend to go deeper on the things you ask me about the most — or the subjects where the real answer is “well… it depends” and we need more than an Instagram caption to explain why. Gluten is VERY much one of those.
But I also have absolutely no idea what the next few newsletters are going to look like. This is still very much an ongoing situation. I’m still in a lot of pain and it’s been pretty disruptive to normal life over here. So I’m giving myself some room to figure out what I can realistically do while we sort this out.
Maybe you’ll get gluten. Maybe you’ll get something shorter. Maybe I’ll have something interesting to teach you from whatever I learn through all of THIS. Maybe my cervical spine will continue running the editorial calendar for a little while.
We’ll see.
I do still have a massive desire to teach and share things with you, even if what that looks like needs to be a little different right now.
So I’m going to try to get that gluten deep dive to you soon. I’m just not putting it — or myself — on a deadline at the moment.
Stay wild and well,
Tara
