I lost two years of my life being told I was fine.
I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue, and if you’ve never lived it, “tired” doesn’t begin to cover it. I missed big life events. I leaned on friends and family to take care of my girls on the days I couldn’t get out of bed. My hair was coming out so fast I was embarrassed to sit in the salon chair. And underneath all of it was an anxiety I couldn’t explain.
It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d done every diet under the sun — Weight Watchers, Keto, vegetarian, carnivore, fat-free everything. I was so desperate I even tried Optavia. I followed the rules to a T, and I was still falling apart.
So I did what you’re supposed to do. I went to my PCP. We ran the standard labs. I was told they were normal, and I was offered an SSRI. I never filled it — because I knew, in my gut, that my anxiety was coming from somewhere a pill for my brain was never going to reach.
So I went looking myself. This was before the days of ChatGPT, so I did it the hard way — Google, late nights, piecing it together one search at a time. That’s how I figured out I needed a full iron panel that no one had ever run. My ferritin came back at 5. Five. I’d been running on empty for years, living in fight-or-flight, with a thyroid that was quietly underproducing the whole time — and not one standard panel had caught any of it.
So I went back to school. I trained in functional health and learned to read labs against optimal ranges, not just the reference range printed on the page. And there it was — everything the standard panel had missed, in black and white.
Addressing it was not fast. I knew going in it would be months, even years and it was. But piece by piece, as I worked through what my labs and my body had been trying to tell me all along, I came back. The fatigue lifted. My hair grew back. The anxiety quieted. I felt like me again.
Today I do this work because I was dismissed and gaslit for the better part of five years, and I know I’m not the only one. I’m not here to make my doctor the villain. She worked inside a system built to catch disease, not to answer the questions I was asking. That’s the gap I live in now. And it’s the gap I’ll close for you.
