How I Took My Health into My Own Hands - My Story Part 4/6

This is the fourth article in a six part series, capturing the experiences that have shaped my life most and put me on the path to creating iamYiam, which is building the future of personalised healthcare through an AI powered companion, syd.

I was in the GP’s office hanging on to my chair.?

I had been feeling awful for years now despite trying everything suggested by the mass of doctors and specialists who had tried to help me treat my heart and thyroid condition.

Now, here I was again asking for a referral to another specialist but this time my doctor refused. “We can’t spend any more on specialists,” he said.

He then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes trying to get me out of his office without succeeding.

Suddenly as the exchange was tailing off I came to a realisation. He had done everything he could. He had reached the end of his sphere of competence.

If I was ever going to solve my health problems, I was going to have to take matters into my own hands, just as I had done when leaving for university all those years ago.

This was a challenge that was way beyond my capabilities at the time, but my life depended on me solving it. So I set to work.?

I started off by defining what success looked like for me, which at the time was simply getting up in the morning feeling energised, clear headed and ready to take on the day.

The next step was diving into all the available research I could get my hands on, sifting through the good, the bad and the ugly to discern what I should be paying attention to.

From this came a daily schedule, with a list of simple activities, from drinking a certain amount of water to exercising and meditating.

I also created a set of variables that I tracked with a simple mini scale from 1-10 based on my subjective experience of them that day.

This gave me a simple point of reference for figuring out whether things were actually getting better or not.

On top of this, I went for blood tests to check my hormone levels every 3 months and as the numbers improved, I was able to reduce my medication gradually.

Finally after 2 years of trial and error, I felt better than I ever had before.

The doctors were astounded and couldn’t believe I’d managed to get my levels back down to a normal range given that they’d been 17x higher when the problem was first diagnosed.

While this development called for pure joy, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief, mixed in with some doubt and anxiety over whether I’d actually fixed myself this time.??

I needed a way to prove to myself that I really was better.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), just a few days after that clean bill of health, the opportunity to dispel those doubts and see where I was really at physically appeared out of the blue in the form of a challenge that I'll remember for the rest of my life.

Lorena

The next article in the series will be published on Monday 12 July