Chin up: Epilogue

Any day now marks 20 years since the wedding when I dislocated my right ankle and broke the medial malleolus (see photo montage above!). I don’t actually like to dwell on the past, but this event started this epic health journey and I still have to cope with its impact today.

What I’m trying to say is, it feels like a good time to give you an update.

I realise that what I’ve been doing doesn’t make a lot of sense to anyone else, so here’s a little re-cap:*

• Overall goal: Regain full movement abilities, proper function, clarity of thinking. Stop pain and weirdness.
• Aim: Kill and remove the fungal overgrowth from my insides that has caused everything to seize up.
• Particular areas of focus: Neck, upper spine, and shoulders; hips & pelvic area
• Method: Work with my body to 1) weaken/kill fungus and support immune system, 2) unblock lymph so waste can be removed, 3) re-wire my brain to engage correct muscles.
• Results: This year has been very hard indeed and I am still in the process of healing BUT… my head/neck/spine/brain are more or less free of gunk (which meant I dealt with the summer heat much better this year). My hips don’t hurt anymore (well, mostly), nor click, nor feel stiff. In general, I don’t grind, click, or pop so much. I’m not so gristly. I’m sturdier on my feet – my abdominal muscles, core, and lower legs and ankles are (weak but) working. Sometimes.

Process

In early January 2021, around the time I published the last post of Chin Up, I crawled back into my cave and started putting into practice all I had learned for one final push.

I was significantly better than the Christmas before, but still having trouble with just about everything: blocked head, squiffy vision, difficulty walking, peeing urgency, pain and soreness, especially in my hips/lower belly and shoulder blade/collar bone. Yadder, yadder. I still felt wrong and wasn’t able to do stuff.

So I stopped drinking much booze (fungus loves it) and let go of the stress of the autumn (stress is another fungus food, and a new and badly paid job didn’t help). I was going to kill this fucking parasite once and for all! I didn’t think it would take much longer.

Kill it and help my body get rid of the dead stuff, which it does through the lymphatic system. To this end, and really crucially, I discovered dry brushing as a technique for stimulating the flow of lymph…

Swept away

As most lymph vessels are found very close to the surface (within the dermis, the second layer of the skin where you’ll also find blood vessels, nerve endings and hair roots), they’re surprisingly easy to access. By brushing the skin in the right direction with a soft brush – you can get body brushes for this purpose, though I use a brush from a dustpan-and-brush set! – you can literally push the lymphatic fluid along its way. Like sweeping a dirty floor.

Direction is very important, pushing the fluid and its cargo of waste towards the lymph nodes that will filter it, or ultimately towards the subclavian arteries under the collarbones where it gets dumped into the blood stream for processing. A map is necessary.

It’s hard to believe how effective this is! Slow, but steady.

It sounds very serene but it’s just been never-ending. My internal environment is unstable as it’s in a state of constant change – I go through these cycles of being OK, then I do a new stretch or something that changes something, then I’m really bad for a day or two, then the dust settles and I’m a bit better than before, then something changes again, and so on. My sleep is very disrupted; how I am changes hourly and depends on what I do.

At first I focused on legs, hips and belly, convinced I would soon brush away the excess fluid that’s visibly accumulated there. But I soon realised that my neck/spine/shoulder girdle/head generally was chock-full of old stuck (fungus-laden) lymph that had lost its way and needed some help to get out.

(I already knew that wearing anything tight around my ribcage, eg a bra, stopped the lymph from draining. I discovered – just this summer! – that wearing a racer back kind of top draws the lymph in towards the spine. Crazy.)

I also realised that clearing what’s nearer the surface then allows deeper stuck stuff to be released and get moving through the system.

And it seems my lymphatic system has gone haywire! Lymph flows up when it should be draining down (like in my head and neck), or down when it should be going up (arms and legs). I swear, toxic waste that was newly released from deep in my hips, for example, ended up in my spine at the neck. Bonkers and very wrong.

So my brushing became more targeted, purposeful, and thorough. It takes about 15 minutes to do myself from top to toe. I still do it every day.

Once the toxic waste finally gets into the blood system for processing, it’s not a fun experience. Still, it was necessary (the only way) and I believe I’ve nearly cleared it all.

A four-pronged approach

Fungus. Lymph. Physio. Qigong.

While brushing the lymph to get rid of the fungus was the main thing, I’ve also spent a lot of time on neuromuscular re-education.**

All my walking muscles have been affected, but it wasn’t just a case of doing exercises to get them stronger. Firstly, using a muscle that hasn’t been working seems to squeeze out the fungal gunk it’s covered in/full of, like when the pirate ship in The Goonies comes to life and shakes off all the dust from the ropes 🙂

Then the gunk is travelling through my system, irritating nerves and tissues as it passes. And then I have to convince my brain that it’s OK now to use the newly fungus-free muscle, building new neural pathways and movement patterns. This hasn’t been easy.

Sometimes I try and use my conscious mind to get my brain to do it right (for example, silently shouting “Heels!” as I walk, to be really aware that I’m properly putting my weight through my feet). Other times I use more static, repetitive, muscle engagement training (the ‘bridge’ pose is very good for engaging gluteal muscles in the buttocks, for example).

But so often, especially when something changed internally or I was in an unfamiliar place/situation, brain would revert to old habits. It used those well-worn neural connections developed over 20 years to try and compensate for all the internal damage I had. And when it did this, I was a wibbly mess all over again.

How bad my walking has become has taken me by surprise and no-one believes me when I say I’m getting better; my physical abilities have totally nosedived as time has gone on and I’m apparently worse than before. But my brain is rediscovering how to walk correctly, and more and more I can feel the right muscles working and doing the job they were designed for.

Externally, my calves and thighs are more muscular, my legs a bit less twisted, my chest more upright, my shoulders relaxed down and back… You probably wouldn’t notice these things unless you knew what to look for.

Then there’s qi, the concept of energy used in Chinese medicine. I’m wary to mention this aspect as I know some will dismiss it and just stop listening.

But I can report that qi is very real. When I’ve stimulated acupuncture points or done some qigong, stuff happens! I think all the fungal growth and lymph gunge blocked the flow of qi. Getting it more lively and moving again is helping to clear out the gunk.

Making connections

I hope you can see that what I measure when I say I’m getting better/healing – and if you know me, you’ll have been hearing this for at least a couple of years – is not the visible stuff. It’s all these internal changes rather than what I can or can’t do. It’s frustrating, but I know full function will follow.

I am starting now to think about contacting health professionals and getting what I’ve learned noticed:

I need to speak to a fungal specialist about the invasive internal infection.

I want to share my experience with the lymph rerouting up my spine with a lymph specialist.

(If you are one of these people or know one, please get in touch!)

I find I am still quite reluctant to see a doctor, however. I think that’s both about the trauma my body has suffered and also fear of interference – I know what I’m doing and I’m so pleased with my progress, I need to stay on my path. I’m wary of this getting messed up.

But the cave is dark and lonely. It would be good to have another perspective and some support, so I’m going to start by talking to the acupuncturist I saw years ago and tell her what happened since.

I have no desire at the moment to do anything about the old MS diagnosis. It seems so irrelevant now. I got my records from the hospital; what’s most striking is how not very ill I was!

My interest in anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and general body stuff has just exploded because of my experience these past few years. I don’t have the training and qualifications to actually be a professional physiotherapist, so I plan to refocus this blog, posting useful pieces about our bodies, how they work, and how amazing they are.

Stay tuned!

*This looks like a very organised project plan, but the reality has been much more messy!

**Lymph clearing meets posture: I discovered that sitting with my thoracic spine more relaxed, rather than ‘sitting up straight’, actually allows the lymph to drain. As we already know, good sitting posture comes from the pelvis anyway, and mine has slowly been un-tilting, the soft lumbar curve reappearing as hips un-stiffen.