Olivia Johnson

I Drove Past My Own House

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Long post, sorry. Throwaway because my daughter follows my main account and I'm not ready for her to read all of this. I'm 61. For about nine years I've been "the sick one." If you've been that person, you already know what I mean. If you haven't, I hope you never are. It started in my early 50s. At first it was just bloating. By dinner, my stomach would swell so badly my waistband left red marks on my skin, like I'd been wearing a belt two sizes too small. Then came the tiredness. Not sleepy. I'd sleep ten hours and wake up feeling like I'd been hit by a car. Then the fog. One afternoon I drove past my own house. I didn't recognize my street. I kept going for about a mile before I realized, then pulled into a church parking lot and sat there shaking. And then there was the itching at night. I'm only going to say this once, because it still embarrasses me. It was in places you don't talk about, and it would wake me up at 3 a.m. and I'd scratch until I bled. I started sleeping in cotton gloves so I wouldn't tear my skin open. I saw my GP. Then a GI. Then a different GI. Then a gynecologist, because the GI suggested it. Then a dermatologist for the itching. Then a "functional medicine" guy who charged me $400 for an hour and sold me $200 of powders. Every single one of them ran tests, and every single one of them came back and said the same four words. "Your tests are normal." I want to describe the look, because if you know it, you know it. The doctor comes back in, sits down on the little rolling stool, and gets this kind, patient smile. The one you'd give a child who says there's a monster in the closet. And then they gently start asking how things are at home. Am I sleeping okay. Am I under a lot of stress. One of them handed me a pamphlet for a counseling center. Then, about three years ago, I logged into the patient portal at 11 p.m. to check a result. And I read the visit note. "Pt presents w/ multiple vague GI complaints. Likely health anxiety." I read it standing in my kitchen in the dark. Then I went out to the garage, sat in my car with the door closed, and cried so my husband wouldn't hear me. Because that's the thing nobody tells you. After enough "normal" tests, you start believing them. I started thinking maybe it was me. Maybe I was making it up. Maybe I was one of those women who just needs attention. So I stopped bringing it up, even to my husband. I'd skip dinner with friends and say I was tired. I'd turn down trips because I didn't know where the bathrooms would be. I got very, very good at pretending I was fine. Ok. Here's the weird part, and the reason I'm posting. A few months ago my granddaughter, who's 19 and in college and reads everything, sent me a link with the message "nana I think this is you lol." It was a blog post about an old medical account. A man who lived a very long time ago wrote down his own symptoms, because nobody else would take them seriously. He said he'd been sick most of his life. He could feel something inside him every time the weather changed, or when he got upset, like a wisp of horsehair caught in his throat. He saw physicians. They decided he had a blood disorder. One of them suggested it was a venereal disease, which, back then, was about the most shameful thing you could say about a man. Their treatments took his money and made him worse. And when he kept insisting something was living inside him, they dismissed him as "a fanciful wretch, whose disorder had no existence but in imagination." I had to put my phone face down on the table. Hundreds of years ago. Same story. Same smile, probably, from a man in a powdered wig instead of on a rolling stool. But here's what actually got me. He wasn't imagining it. It was a tapeworm. He finally found a powder that pushed a long piece of it out of him. He had proof. And then he kept taking the powder, and nothing else came out. And he got sick again. He got part of it. Not all of it. I sat there and thought about the drugstore cleanse I'd done two years before. I'd felt better for about three weeks, really better, and then everything came back worse than before. And do you know what I told myself? See. It didn't work, because there was nothing there. It's in your head. That old man's story told me the opposite. It might have worked exactly as well as his powder did. Partway. I went down a rabbit hole that night. I'm not going to pretend it was scientific. It was me at 2 a.m. reading everything I could find. But the same thing kept coming up, especially from farm people, old-timers, people who raise animals. Parasites don't just sit there waiting to be killed. They build a kind of slimy film around themselves and their eggs. Hit them with something weak and you kill some of the adults, but the eggs sit there protected. About three weeks later they hatch. You feel better for three weeks, then crash, and you assume the cleanse "didn't work." Three weeks. That was exactly my timeline. My neighbor has raised goats for 30 years, so the next morning I walked over in my robe and asked her about it. She didn't even blink. She said it's exactly how it works with her animals, and that you have to get all of it at once or you're wasting your time. Her grandmother used to give the whole family wormwood every spring. For anyone who wants the actual details, since I know I would, the combination that kept coming up was: Wormwood, the old one, for breaking through that film and killing the adults Black walnut, for the young ones Pumpkin seed, which makes them lose their grip so they actually pass out of you instead of dying inside Oregano, so your gut isn't a comfortable place for anything to move back into Clove, which is what goes after the eggs. That's the part I'm pretty sure my drugstore cleanse never touched. The other thing that kept coming up was that it should be in oil. Dry powder capsules get broken down by your stomach acid before they reach the gut, which is where these things actually live. My neighbor uses one called Holior. It has all five, plus thirteen other ingredients, pressed in oil and sealed in softgels. 6,600 mg a serving, third-party tested. You take three in the morning before you eat. That's it. No tinctures, no tea, no 14-step protocol from a man who charges $400 an hour. I ordered it that afternoon. I didn't tell my husband. The first few days, I didn't leave the house. I'm going to be honest about one moment, because I think some of you need to hear it. On day two, I saw something in the toilet. I'm not going to describe it. But I stood there and stared at it. Then I sat down on the edge of the tub and laughed, and then I cried, and then I laughed again. My husband knocked on the door to ask if I was okay, and I couldn't even answer him. Because it was proof. Nine years. Six doctors. One pamphlet. One line in a chart. And there it was. I wasn't a fanciful wretch. The real moment, though, the one that made me sit down and write all this, came a few weeks later. We'd had my daughter's family over for Sunday dinner. Pot roast, potatoes, rolls, everything I'd normally pay for all night. After everyone left, I was getting ready for bed, and I did what I've done every single night for nine years. I pulled my waistband down in the bathroom mirror to look at the red marks. There weren't any. I actually leaned closer to the mirror like I'd missed them. I hadn't. My skin was just skin. And then I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd scratched in my sleep. I'd stopped wearing the gloves at some point and hadn't even noticed. The fog has lifted too. Last week I drove across town to my daughter's new house, a route I'd only taken once, and didn't second-guess a single turn. My husband asked me last week why I'm laughing so much lately. I told him everything. All of it. He was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "I'm sorry I didn't push harder for you." I'm not posting this to tell anyone to stop seeing their doctors. Please don't. Some of what they ran probably ruled out scarier things, and I'm grateful for that. I'm posting it because I know some of you are sitting in your car in the garage right now. I know some of you have a line in your chart you're ashamed of. And I want you to know that "your tests are normal" is not the same thing as "nothing is wrong." That man was called a fanciful wretch. He was right. So are you, probably. TL;DR: 9 years of bloating, exhaustion, brain fog, and night itching. Every test came back "normal," and a doctor wrote "health anxiety" in my chart. An old account of a man doctors dismissed as a "fanciful wretch," who turned out to have a tapeworm, made me try again with something that targets the eggs, not just the adults. Day two, I had my proof. A few weeks later, I had my life back. EDIT: A lot of you are asking what it was. It's Holior. They're doing buy 2, get 1 free right now with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is honestly what made me willing to try one more thing after nine years of things that didn't work. I got the third for my husband. After everything, he figured he should probably do it too.