Cat Williford
I met Michelle Phelps, founder of REViVE: Hope for Health, in November 2020. By December, we had scheduled a 30-minute Zoom meeting to share our stories of navigating through medical crisis moments. In typical Michelle fashion, she wanted to know more about me and what I share in my book, The Ovarian Chronicles: Expectations Heartache Resilience, a medical memoir of overcoming several big and terrifying health challenges. Almost two hours later, we knew we were kindred spirits on what I call the awakening-and-taking-charge-of-your-health journey.
I am deeply inspired by Michelle’s story of all the ways she supported her beloved husband, Brian, especially all the ways she leveraged her curiosity and courage, while her heart was breaking, to go beyond their beliefs and the accepted norms of Western Medicine. That is not easy, y’all.
The Western Medicine healthcare system teaches us to entrust our bodies to doctors. Once upon a time, this felt a lot easier to me than it does today. My father was a surgeon, so I am steeped in, and have been the recipient of, its brilliance! I still have the pin in my femur, inserted my senior year of high school, after a car-train accident. I am also in awe of its stunning interventions. I donated a kidney to my adored father, and its pain-relieving drugs still diminish migraine pain enough for me to function.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I began to feel the way I thought it would feel like to be eighty. I went from Energizer Bunny levels of vigor to waking up tired after nine hours of sleep. I had a chronic urinary tract infection and, with one kidney, the urologist put me on a six-month low dose antibiotic regimen. All sorts of stomach woes and a near constant headache were happening, simultaneously. My loved ones were visibly concerned about me. Then, a six-month long siege began of pharyngitis (inflammation at the back of the throat). I finished one round of antibiotics and almost immediately began another a few days later. At one point the urologist, gastroenterologist and neurologist all indicated that my health woes were in my head.
Even though it felt downright disloyal to my father, I began to consider that the system I’d relied upon until then was failing me. After one more round of antibiotics and my body became weaker, I knew — Western Medicine was not able to support me in understanding what was happening in my body.
By 28 years old, I was in total brain fog. If I’d had this Guidebook as a resource, when my doctors became mystified and my downward spiral began, the prompt questions in the Prepare & Share worksheets could have helped me to be more clear about my actual symptoms. Instead, it all felt so vague. In answering the Prepare & Share questions, I would have been able to connect the dots, that the medications I was taking were leading to my gastrointestinal issues, because I would have had a structured place to capture those unwanted and unintended consequences of all the antibiotics. I would have been empowered to ask more specific questions of my doctors, to help them help me. Instead, I saw it in their eyes — they thought I was one of those patients who wasn’t sick, because routine tests didn’t uncover what they were trained to see.
If I'd had access to the Guidebook’s Medicine Spectrum chart, I would have been able to shave almost eighteen months of searching for answers down to a month or two, as I would have seen a variety of options available to me, that my upbringing and beliefs hadn’t ever given to me. I would not have had to wait for a mentor to hear my story of feeling worse, by the day, to even know there were options like Integrative, Functional or Naturopathic Medicines. By the time I arrived on a Naturopathic M.D.’s doorstep, I was anemic, malnourished, and depressed, with a fever of 103 degrees. His diagnosis, in 1991, of the odd sounding systemic candidiasis (fungal infection caused by yeast overgrowth), before everyone started talking about it ten years later, wasn’t even a possibility to my highly trained and highly regarded Western Medicine doctors. It took almost a full year, but with my Naturopathic M.D.’s support and guidance, I recovered completely.
Fast forward fifteen years, I found myself in another place of not understanding what was happening with my body. Unfortunately, another crisis moment between fertility woes and a growth on my right ovary erupted. Fortunately, I’d had the experience of seeking alternative support, before. Yet, once again, I felt disloyal to my father when I did not have the recommended surgery. That said, I am convinced, if I'd had the Guidebook, leading up to the crisis around my fertility and ovarian growth, I would have been much more conscious of the “quiet” symptoms and would have gotten support sooner.
With full faith, I say, this Guidebook could save your life, or that of a loved one.
Through our individual, yet very similar, journeys to advocating, Michelle and I both learned this: Ask questions. Don’t assume someone in scrubs or a white lab coat knows more about your body (or your loved one’s body) than you do. Understand that most Western Medicine professionals are doing their best, yet there is an inherent limitation in highly specialized and siloed medicine. Most alternative approaches have been around for millennia on other continents and in other civilizations. And there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to our health.
Another thing I truly love about this Guidebook is how it supports us, even when we are not in crisis mode, so we can genuinely prepare for an annual exam. We live in a too-fast-paced world (okay, my opinion) and often don’t touch base with ourselves. This Guidebook also serves as a record-keeper, which totally beats my pile of scribbled notes on backs of envelopes or sticky notes!
One reason I wrote my book is the realization that, if I’d been able to read about someone’s similar fertility story, I would have made different choices earlier. This is the value in sharing our stories. That said, my own experiences, and years of coaching others, have taught me to question the parts of our stories that tell us we “can’t” and “shouldn’t” and keep us stuck in “always” and “never” and “the way it is” or “the way I am”.
At a certain point, we must surrender what we think we know, to discover the innate wisdom inside of us. The first step is to get curious. This Guidebook provides excellent tools to point our curiosity toward preparing for our next doctor visit — from annual exams to those darn health hiccup moments.
Here’s to our powerful response-ability in taking charge of our own health and well-being.
Cat Williford, MCC
Author of The Ovarian Chronicles: Expectations Heartache Resilience Master Certified Coach and Speaker for Women since 1994