NOTE: This is part three in a blog series on my 15-year journey to better health. Want to start from the beginning? Click here to start with part one.

I thought the medical system would help me. I was wrong.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

–Thomas Reid

The Infertility

After a year of failed attempts to conceive our second child, I sought out a top-rated OBGYN specializing in infertility. I shared everything—my smooth first pregnancy, the unexplained pelvic pain that followed, and the heartbreaking cycle of trying and failing to conceive again. He suspected endometriosis, so he ordered a pelvic laparoscopy. 

The procedure was simple enough–a few tiny incisions on my lower abdomen and a short time under, but the recovery was horrible.  In a pelvic laparoscopy, your pelvic area is filled up with carbon dioxide so they can move everything around and see better. After the procedure, I was out of work for several days with extreme pain until the carbon dioxide was absorbed into my digestive system and released.  The results came back “normal.” No endometriosis–everything looked “perfectly fine.” I was heartbroken to find no answers.

The laparoscopy took place in 2011, and what my doctors never mentioned at that time, was that the images clearly showed enlarged, varicose ovarian veins. The finding was circled in the scans, yet no one thought it was worth telling me.  In legs, varicose veins are known to cause fatigue, pain, and cramps. But when they appear in the pelvis? My OBGYN dismissed them as irrelevant. Years later, I would learn how critical this overlooked detail was.

On the upside, one month later, I was elated to find out that we were finally pregnant with our second. While the laparoscopy didn’t find any problems, maybe just being told everything was okay was enough for my body to work. This is another lesson I wouldn’t learn until years later; that stress and the state of the brain can heavily impact physical health.

The Pain

During my second pregnancy, a deep, persistent ache settled into my left hip—the same side where my pelvic pain was the worst. At first, I brushed it off as a normal pregnancy discomfort, but it only grew in severity. I was very fit at the time that I got pregnant, and did prenatal yoga throughout the pregnancy. After my son was born, the pain continued to increase, starting to travel down into my left thigh. I continued with post-natal yoga, but it wasn’t helping. Again, I expected this to just be part of recovery, but when it hadn’t improved six months later, I decided to get help.

I tried the occasional massage, hoping they would support my body’s healing process. The masseuses could never believe how locked up my hip, glutes, and leg were each time I came in. They suggested I might have an alignment issue after childbirth and recommended I see a chiropractor. A member of my family had a stroke the day after seeing a chiropractor and was forever after sentenced to a life of pain in a wheelchair, so I had a very large fear of them, and pushed the idea off for a while. I got an ergonomic and hip friendly elliptical, an ergonomic chair, and kept up with the yoga and massages.

One morning after an elliptical workout the night before, I woke up unable to walk. The pain was unbearable. Desperate, I finally booked an appointment with a chiropractor my coworker had recommended.

I left my first appointment hopeful–he spent a lot of time with me before any adjustments, and went into a lot of guidance around posture and stretches, which all seem to fit my preference for holistic approaches.  Hearing my back and neck crack unsettled me, but the immediate relief was enough to convince me. A few days later, my hip pain had slightly eased—just enough to keep me coming back.

The second appointment left me uneasy. This time, there was no extended consultation—just a quick hook-up to a TENS machine, a series of adjustments, and a rushed goodbye. When I asked about the worsening pain on my left side, I got vague reassurances but no real answers. In the days following, the soreness worsened. By a week and a half later, my hip and glutes were so locked up that I couldn’t even bend over to put on my shoes. And I could barely walk without pain shooting up the left side of my back.

Two weeks later, I was completely laid up. I had muscle spasms that wrapped around my hip, into my groin, and down my inner thigh. Every time I walked, the pain shot up the left side of my back.

Two weeks later, I was completely laid up. I had muscle spasms that wrapped around my hip, into my groin, and down my inner thigh. Every time I walked, the pain shot up the left side of my back. I had to work from home on my couch for several days, switching between ice and heat trying to get things to settle down. Although I was scared to go back to the chiropractor, I did, if only just to see what he was thinking about where all this new pain was coming from.

In my third appointment, I told him what’d been going on. He explained that this was a ‘flare,’ which he said is normal after being adjusted to proper alignment. He did an extra assessment of my spine and pointed out a spot in my lower spine where he said one of my vertebra was tipped inward a bit, which was likely putting pressure on my nerve. I went to three more appointments with this guy, but instead of things getting better, they continued to be worse than when I initially came in. I had to use heat and ice daily, and increase my massages, just to get by.

I wanted so badly for the chiropractic care to work. I believed in holistic healing, and I didn’t want to give up on the idea that alignment could help my pain. But each visit left me worse off, so I decided to find physical therapist that focused on athletic medicine. This new PT didn’t give me any diagnosis per se, but recommended I go to her for physical therapy for my back/spine twice per week. I saw her 12-15 times, but again saw no improvement.

I looked up a highly rated back doctor in my network, hoping he could help. I told him about the shooting pains I now have in my glutes, down my hamstring, around my hip and into my groin. I told him how my pain worsened with bending or walking. I told him about the chiropractor and the physical therapy that didn’t help. He was the first person to take an X-ray of my spine, and diagnosed me with a lumbar disc herniation at L4, and told me physical therapy would help me get better. I left frustrated. I had just gotten done going to and paying for 12+ weeks of PT with no gains, so I decided I wasn’t going to do that again… at least not then. At 35, I bought a lumbar support pillow in hopes that it would help, and kept doing yoga and occasional massages.

The Sickness & Energy Issues

As my pain intensified, so did something else—digestive issues. I’d always had occasional stomach troubles, but by this point they were impossible to ignore. I found myself documenting symptoms in my journal, scouring the internet for answers, and wondering if this was just another mystery my doctors would dismiss. My stomach was constantly upset. I had daily battles with bloating and gas, sometimes so bad it put me in bed. I vacillated between constipation and diarrhea. During my second pregnancy, my digestion slowed so drastically that my OB put me on a daily laxative powder just to keep things moving.

A few years earlier, my husband and I had tried the paleo diet—only meat, veggies, nuts, and fruit, cutting out grains, legumes, and dairy. I felt incredible. My energy soared, my body felt lighter, and for the first time in ages, I wasn’t battling bloating and fatigue. But I didn’t make the connection yet. When I reintroduced bread into my diet—a hot dog and bun that I will forever remember—I was sick for days. Still, I chalked it up to a ‘reintroduction issue’ and went back to my usual eating habits, the standard American diet.

When my son was six months old, a documentary on detoxing caught my attention. Intrigued, my husband and I decided to try juicing. I wrote about it on this blog when I first started, and again a few months later. I reported going from a daily struggle to pull myself out of bed or stay up long enough to finish the dishes from dinner, to feeling amazing and having so much energy than before. I wasn’t just juicing during that detox time period, but I cut out most foods–eating just veggies and veggie broth in addition to the fruit and vegetable juices. I said at the time that I knew it was important to eat whole, unprocessed foods like the paleo diet recommends, but I didn’t understand the full impact and I missed my treats, so I stopped. And the juicing was expensive and time consuming, so it didn’t last.

I also started struggling with horrible allergies several times a year. I didn’t just get a runny nose and sore throat from drainage, but instead I ended up with asthmatic bronchitis or some other infection each time. It even started to cause me to miss work.

While I dismissed my fatigue as part of motherhood, I finally sought medical help for my persistent stomach issues and severe allergies. My regular doctor smiled and nodded at me while he said I was in great health–my BMI was good, cholesterol low, blood pressure low, etc. He said allergies are normal and prescribed a cocktail of three different medicines to take each time they start to kick up. For my stomach, he prescribed me Citrucel and told me to eat more fiber. While the allergy medicines didn’t do anything to eliminate my allergies, they at least prevented me from getting as many infections and missing as much work, so I kept taking those. The fiber made my stomach worse, so I stopped that after a few weeks.

Stay Tuned

It would take me another 12 years to piece everything together—to realize that these medications were merely masking symptoms, that my diet was silently fueling my suffering, and that the answers had been hiding in front of me all along.

In the next leg of my journey (part 4), my health struggles deepen—new symptoms emerge, existing ones intensify, and I continue my search for answers.