The year was 2012. I had three little boys ages one, three, and five. My husband had gotten on the fire department in 2010 and was away at his first firefighters convention. The world closed on me, I cried and didn’t know what to do.
For the three or four days he was gone, I wandered the house like a zombie. More tired than I had ever been before. I didn’t understand what was happening, but with three little boys, I went through the motions. I made sure they were clean and fed. I read to them, put them down for naps and bedtime, watched them play with their toys. We watched their favorite PBS and Disney shows and snuggled close.
The brain fog in my head was as thick as pea soup and deep down, I was terrified. I thought I was buckling under the pressure, that I couldn’t do it all for days without my other half. I thought I was crazy. I even thought I was dying.
Once my husband returned, I went to bed, and just like that, I couldn’t get out of bed, didn’t want to get out of bed. My get-up-and-go had gotten up and left, without me. I lay in bed and sobbed. I was drained, depleted, exhausted. I lay there in our bed, staring at the wall for hours at a time. No matter how much I slept, it didn’t alleviate the fatigue. I tried over the counter supplements. I tried exercise as I had always felt good after a run. Nothing was helping.
I put in a call to my PCP. We talked, I sobbed, he put me on an antidepressant. I went home, took the antidepressant, had a panic attack. I called the doctor, he prescribed an anti-anxiety, I took it, I depended on it. I continued to spend my days staring at the wall, a shell of my former self. I prayed. I searched for answers.
And then one day I spoke to a friend who used a functional medicine doctor. I didn’t know what else to do. I had been praying every day. When I found out the psychiatrist wasn’t covered under our insurance but the functional medicine doctor was, I saw that as an answered prayer for which direction to go next.
Functional medicine looks for the root cause of an ailment, taking the whole body into account. After an extensive physical exam and an obscene amount of blood work, I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue and vitamin deficiencies. So basically, I wasn’t crazy, and this wasn’t all in my head.
My body had been giving me warning signs for awhile, but I wasn’t tuned to what my body was trying to tell me. While this all felt very sudden and drastic at the onset, the truth is, all the warning signs had been there for months, but I ignored them. I ignored the heart palpitations. I ignored the twitching under my eye and in my leg. I ignored the increased irritability. I ignored the impatience. I ignored it all until it pinned me down. I ignored it all until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
My body had been living in fight or flight mode for so long that it now needed recovery time, and the road to recovery was long and hard. I couldn’t do life the way I had been before. All I wanted was to heal, so I followed the doctors orders to the letter. I had a large supplement regimen. My diet was completely different, detoxing my body and not taxing my adrenals. My physical activity and exercise were limited, and I required a lot more rest, breaks, and sleep than I had been getting previously. The fatigue and brain fog made me anxious, and I struggled with panic attacks at random times.
This recovery time was also a rebuilding of my life. I couldn’t go on the way I had been, and I couldn’t go backward, nor did I want to. No, I wanted better. I wanted better for myself. I wanted better for my husband. I wanted better for my kids. At my lowest, I was able to strip everything else away and focus on what was important—family.
It was also important to take care of myself. Obviously, I had not been doing a great job at self-care. I learned to listen to my body and have boundaries. I learned my rhythms. I learned to eat whole foods and not junk. I learned to manage my emotions. I learned how to process my past traumas. I learned how to live in the present.
A turning point for me came about a week or so in to the healing process. I sat on my living room floor and began cleaning up. My dad was there and noticed. It was at this very moment, surrounded by Fisher-Price and Hot Wheels that I knew I was getting some drive back, I knew that what I was doing was working and that healing had begun.
At times it was all very frustrating as it seemed I was focused on healing and not really on living. I was always in search of answers, looking for what would make me feel better faster. I came to realize that I wouldn’t heal overnight. Just like it took years of stress to build up to a crash, it would take years of work for healing.
I not only needed physical healing but emotional healing as well. As my body regained strength and absorbed the Vitamin D, Magnesium, and other vitamins I was severely deficient in, I worked on dealing with my past and all the trauma, stress, and hurts I had accumulated over my lifetime from a stressful childhood, to my parents eventual divorce, a devastating miscarriage, and the loss of my mom to cancer. I did this through talking to a therapist, going to a chiropractor, going to church, and really learning to trust God with my story.
As I look back all these years later, I know God is the author of my story, and He used that season of my life to show me his goodness and faithfulness. I experienced a closeness to Jesus in that time I had never experienced before. At rock bottom, He was my rock and my fortress, my healer and my redeemer. He continues to work on me, in me, and through me.
I still deal with fatigue, I still think about the past, I still get anxious and sad. But through it all, God has made me a better wife, mother, daughter, and friend. As long as I have breath in my body, as long as I have air in my lungs, as long as my heart is beating, I am a work in progress. I am God’s creation, fearfully and wonderfully made. And I pray that every trial He puts before me, every part of my story, He will use to glorify Him.
by Michaela Gasseling 
by Sarah Lango 
