One of the first questions I always ask new patients is "when did you feel your healthiest?" Was it last year? Age 15? Mid 20's? Is it now? The question requires them to pull on an experience of health they can viscerally feel and it gives us something to aim for in treatment.

When I ask myself that question, it's a hard one to answer. I don't remember being healthy. Ever. 

I know. Not a resounding testimonial for the work that I do. But health has eluded me from the moment I arrived on planet Earth. Raging colic as a new born. Legendary allergies as a toddler. I would always get weird viruses or bacteria that doctors had only read about in medical school. I had clubbed feet - so there were braces, podiatrists, shoe inserts, physical therapy, casts, and specialists. The middle school years didn't bring relief - they brought a whole different set of problems. I started having fatigue and crippling joint pain. Lyme's was suspected, but this was the late-80's and no one really knew for sure. When I started menstruating, I would often black out from pain on the bathroom floor.

But when you don't know any differently, you simply work it out. 

We were at the lower end of middle class, so as soon as I was of legal working age, I got a job. Any luxury items that I wanted (i.e. anything other than a roof over my head or food) was my responsibility. As a junior year in high school, I was waiting tables close to 40 hours a week, taking advanced placement courses, and racing on the varsity slalom ski team. I learned to keep myself busy as a means of escape which distracted me from the over riding sense of fatigue that was ever present. I also had an anomalous weight gain, achey muscles, tired joints, and an ever present sense of depression.

Being busy also allowed me to avoid home and the chaotic environment that was a result of my parents’ marriage imploding in slow motion. I was tired of being sick. I was tired of being tired. My coping strategy was to work through the fatigue until I numbed out and collapsed in exhaustion so severe I didn't feel anything.

I was accepted to a college five states away and had all kinds of mixed emotions about going. One of the pre-reqs to attending was a physical exam; administriva that didn't really mean anything to me at the time. Given that this was 1995, I don't remember the details of the appointment or even what my doctor looked like. However, about a week after the appointment I came home to a panicked voice mail containing words such as "thyroid", "dangerous results", and "life long medication". The GP sent a prescription to the pharmacy and I picked up my very first bottle of Synthorid at 18 years old.

I didn't understand why I needed medication, so it was just another thing to ignore. 

I put the meds in my suitcase and promptly forgot all about them. The very definition of overwhelm. College years brought new challenges including penicillin resistant strep combined with Epstein Barr and back pain so extreme it landed me in bed for 5 days at a time on pain killers. I had kidney stones that required surgery, a 40 pound weight gain, and a parental divorce which the judge declared to be the worst he'd seen in 20 years on the bench. 

There were multiple reasons for the decision, but I decided to do a semester abroad in Japan. It’s where my maternal grandparents met after WWII and one of my best friends in high school was Japanese. I also needed to do field research for my anthropology degree. In hindsight, I can see that it was an escape strategy. Five states didn't feel far enough from so home, but maybe a continent and an ocean would. I moved to Kyoto to study for a semester and then renewed my visa to travel and teach English for another 3 months. 

I returned to the US to finish my undergraduate degree and landed a job with the Japanese Education Teaching Programme (J.E.T.) after graduation. The program was sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Education which placed native English speaking college graduates in the public schools alongside Japanese teachers of English. I was desperate to get back to the mountains of Kyoto which had felt like home and I thought this was a good option; however, the Ministry had other plans for me. I was assigned to the village of Ojima, a rural community in Gunma Prefecture three hours west of Tokyo known for its strong winds and strong women. It was terrifying. And perfect. 

While abroad, fate happened.

My days consisted of teaching English at the local junior high school, moonlighting as an English teacher at a Subaru plant, and spending time as a "cultural ambassador". Part of my job during the week included drinking gallons of sake, warbling karaoke, tea ceremony classes, and deep dives of local history. The weekends were full of cherry blossom viewing, taiko drumming, wood block printing, and snowboarding. I dove in head first into any adventure that came my way. For the first year, I was simply known as "gaijin sensei" (foreigner teacher) by my neighbors and townspeople. However, I eventually became known as "Ojima musume" - Ojima’s daughter. I found a sense of purpose and home.

True to form, my body decided to throw a wrench in the works. I'd only been there a few months before my face decided to freeze up with Bell's palsy. No matter how far you go, your troubles are still with you. 

This all happened as the internet was in its infancy - 1999. There was no googling the answer nor stumbling upon a life changing blog post. If you wanted an answer, you had to source it by hunting down people who could give it to you. And I had to do it in Japanese. 

At age 22, I started to explore what "healthy" meant since I didn’t have a frame of reference and communication with the local doctors was difficult since my Japanese was rudimentary. I was eating a strictly Japanese diet and physically active. I switched from skiing to snowboarding and found a new passion for a different kind of movement.

But I wasn't losing weight and would fall asleep in meetings from bone level fatigue. I was mildly depressed for no reason that I could identify. I never thought of myself as being “sick” because I had normalized all my symptoms. I assumed that everyone struggled silently in their own way, so there was no point disclosing my health history or what was going on with me. I didn't want to be a burden to others.

In the middle of snowboarding season, the friend who had introduced me to the sport pulled his hamstring. Instead of being the season ender I had assumed, he was back up riding a few weeks later. 

My question was, "how". His answer was, "acupuncture."

I didn't even know enough about it to even have a stereotype and I couldn't wrap my head around it. My friend scheduled an appointment and escorted me to my first session. I didn't have anything I was "coming in for" - I was there because I had decided to embrace everything Japanese and this was simply another adventure.

Kuribara-sensei, the practitioner, looked like he was 25 years old - I later discovered he was 55 years old. He had an insatiable curiosity, a penchant for bad puns and dad jokes. He embodied a gentleness that I'd never encountered before nor since. I could immediately see why my friend liked him.

The acupuncture clinic had two treatment tables divided by a curtain and the office was an extension of the front of the house. After our appointments, my friends and I would have dinner with Kuribara-sensei and his wife that lasted deep into the night. He tried to explain my thyroid situation to me, but I didn't understand medical Japanese and neither did my little dictionary. But he imparted how important it was that, regardless of anything else, I tackle my thyroid problems head on. 

I wasn't really sure what I was suppose to be physically feeling after my acupuncture appointments, but I knew I liked hanging out with the acupuncturist. I embraced my treatments as simply part of my overall experience abroad.

The strangest thing happened. My menstrual cramps disappeared, my fatigue started to dissipate, my weight started to creep down, and my back stopped hurting.

It was the first time I started to understand what people meant when they said they felt good. Could this be health? I had a full year, the first in my life, where my body was coasting without getting sick. It was a god damned miracle. I had plenty of stress, plenty of booze, plenty of travel - but I was doing OK. I didn't really know what to do with myself. By then I had been living Ojima for two years and it was time to return home.

I left Japan in June 2001 and moved to New York City that October. 

It was just a little more than a month after 9/11. The rational side of my brain screamed “don’t do it”, in part because I had $250 to my name and I suspected the economy was about to tank. But my heart felt like it would be home. So I took a chance and jumped on a discounted flight to NY. 

By January of 2002, I had landed a job with a Japanese tea company and started working at their store on Madison Avenue. Seemed serendipitous and right. I started climbing the corporate ladder one rung at a time; however, when I hit the glass ceiling it knocked me out. During my time with the company, my health went into a nose dive and the headway I had made in Japan disappeared. I started getting undiagnosable rashes, my joints started to become visibly inflamed, there was a fatigue that would start in my marrow and leak into every fiber of my being. I couldn’t think straight, I would forget simple words and my friend’s names. I worried I was losing my mind.

One of my colleagues suggested I see her endocrinologist because she saw herself in my daily struggles. I made an appointment and midway through our conversation, the doctor casually sonogramed my throat. My thyroid appeared in all her glory on the screen in front of me and looked like crystalized stained glass.

“Classic Hashimoto’s” he said. “Hashi-wuuutttt?” I replied.

I burst into sobs of joy. I finally had a name for what was happening to me. I didn't know what it meant - but when we name things, we own them. I was finally ready to own what was happening to my body. I left the appointment with an updated Synthroid prescription, a referral for a nutritionist, and feeling empowered for the first time since returning to the US. I wish I could say that everything magically took a turn for the better - that life has been roses and rosé since.

Nope. Double nope. That’s when shit got hard.

Synthroid didn’t resolve my symptoms. The addition of cytomel (synthetic T3) brought on fibromyalgia. The nutritionist looked at my food journal and told me I was lying. Based on what I was eating, I should be at least 40 pounds lighter (My reply? “No shit buddy. That’s why I’m here.”) My rashes got so weird the dermatologist was calling her colleagues into the room for help. I started having migraines.

So I did what worked before - I found an acupuncturist. Because my body already knew how to manage the needles, within two treatments my symptoms started to recede. I didn't know why it worked. All I knew was that I wanted to feel better and this was an avenue that made sense to me.

It took another couple of years of getting my resources lined up, but I decided to go to Chinese medicine school as a means to figuring out my health and owning my journey.

Admittedly, I didn’t really know what I was getting into at the time. I just knew that I needed something outside of conventional medicine that would explain what was going on with my body. The first day of school I made the false assumption that it would be all rainbows and intuition. Wrong again. It was four years, full time of the hardest learning and studying that I’ve ever done. I thought, “if my health doesn’t kill me, school will.” But I loved the knowledge, the challenge of integrating this sacred knowing into my being, and while still in school, I knew that some day I’d want to teach the medicine to steward the gift of this science into the 21st century.

I graduated in 2009 and jumped into private practice. I had done rotations at St Vincent’s Cancer Center, HIV Center, and the Manhattan VA - where I learned that institutional medicine was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be one-on-one with patients in a small setting where we had time to brainstorm, research, discover, and co-create a path to wellness. I wanted to provide them with all the things that I had been missing in my own journey. I wanted to listen to them. I wanted to hear what their unique experience of being human was like and how we could bring that experience from black and white into 4D technicolor.

My patients are my teachers, my inspiration, and my heart. They are the reason I get out of bed in the morning. Their stories move me to tears and make me a better person. Being human is hard. Our bodies and minds, which are designed to provide an experience for our spirit, come with so many issues. But watching my patients navigate, overcome, and conquer their issues heals my own my broken humanness. I can’t imagine a better job.

It’s been a long ride and I’m by no means cured. My Hashimoto’s has stabilized where I hover at the borderline of auto-immune.

Which I’m fine with because my Hashimoto’s has become a beloved friend. It’s forced me to look for solutions in unexpected places. It’s taught me to forgive my body. The diagnosis of auto-immune initially felt like a gross betrayal but in reality is my body trying to protect me because she loves me more than I’ve loved her. Hashi’s has helped me make connections between catalyst events in my life and taught me emotional literacy. I understand what I’m feeling in new ways.

I now pick battles that I can win instead of going into every fight with a vengeance. I’ve learned to ask for help and allow people to contribute to my experience rather than taking on the world solo. Compassion is often a knee jerk reaction rather than something I struggle to find. My Hashi’s is a tool that I have nothing but gratitude for.

Health is something that dynamically changes and is never constant - despite our best efforts.

I will always be gluten free and curvy in places I struggle to love. Medication is a permanent part of my morning routine and I’ve tried everything from Synthroid, to Cytomel, Nature Throid, to Armour, to Low Dose Naltrexone, to Tirosint. What works best depends on where I am in life. Peri-menopause has given a new flavor to my auto-immune that I’m working to discover.

In the summer of 2018, I had a set-back. I achieved my dream of opening a 4,000 square foot healer’s collective in Manhattan. We had 12 treatment rooms, 16 practitioners, and a space that felt like tree house in heaven. However, I was working 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. I was also running my private practice, teaching at Pacific College, and supervising in the college clinic - I overtaxed my system. The Lyme’s disease that had been hiding in my system since childhood came back with a vengeance (confirmed this time) and the Epstein Barr Virus decided to make a reappearance. I crashed in epic proportions.

As harrowing as it was to get back on my feet, it was an awesome reminder that health is dynamic, not static. It’s a fickle friend that needs be tended to on a daily basis.

Of course, COVID has brought new challenges. Like thousands of small business owners, I lost the collective at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. However, in hindsight, it was the best thing that could have happened. I was able to refocus on patient care and teaching rather than administration management. I was able to get back to my Chinese medicine roots.

My Hashi’s has taught me resiliency and that being able to human well means being able to take a punch.

Acupuncture will always be a cornerstone to keeping my immune system purring while yoga and meditation help me show up where it counts. These things are a priority because they work for me. I say “no” as a strategy to creating space for saying “yes” to things that matter. However, none of these things feel burdensome - they feel like steps moving me towards the best version of myself.