I had to become a functional health expert to get my life back.

During the pandemic, I decided – for the first time in my life – to take a prescription sleeping medication. Like so many, I was stuck in my home alone for weeks on end, which happened to be 2 hours away from civilization. I was having trouble with the lockdown routine.

I thought it would be a few weeks. I ended up stuck on the med for over a year.

Feeling progressively foggier and neurologically compromised, I decided I would come off of it. My doctor told me I could do so without tapering. What I lived through in the months and years afterward is too hellish to describe.

Until that point, I'd lived an active, healthy life with no chronic issues whatsoever. My new problem, "protracted withdrawal syndrome," as it's now sometimes called, exists as a buried footnote in the literature even as the people experiencing it live an unending nightmare. One evening, my nervous system recalibrated without warning, and the symptoms it produced were a kind of torture. Neurological hellfire.

My vision, hearing, breathing, and autonomic system were severely compromised. But I kept going to work. I told myself it would pass. It did not.

Then, in my compromised state, I got COVID.

If you have been through anything like this, you already know what comes next. Two problems, layered, each one obscuring the other. There was a constant ringing in my ears that turned conversation and basic attention into labor. My heart and blood vessels lost their ability to calibrate ("dysautonomia"). Patches of my body went numb and stayed that way. Reading, exertion, looking at screens — my livelihood — became something I could only do for short stretches before the room started to tilt.

For a while, I couldn't tell which symptoms belonged to which problem, and my practitioners were no help. Was the tinnitus the medication or the virus? Was the dysautonomia post-viral, or had the withdrawal pulled my autonomic system off its rails? Were the cognitive symptoms inflammatory or something else? I would have an answer one week and lose it the next, because the two processes weren't parallel but overlapping.

This is the most important takeaway from this experience. The medical system does not have a label for complex multi-system shutdown. I even had my family doc say to me at more than one moment: "is that even a thing? It sounds made up." So I stood outside the system, in spite of countless visits and, eventually, tens of thousands of dollars spent on solutions. I had the scans, the panels, the referrals, and even second (competing) opinions. The summary, repeated in slightly different language across more than a dozen offices, was one of the following: we're not sure; we don't see anything; there's nothing we can do. The worst was the silence, followed by a referral to someone else who would, in time, disappear or also tell me there was nothing they could do.

The decision

There comes a point when you have to decide what to do in the face of systemic failure at every turn. You can accept it, which means accepting the new bottom-rung floor of your life, and somehow navigating indescribable pain. So many people will have fallen through the cracks this way. One option, at that point, is assisted death. Or you can refuse this compromised floor, which means becoming fully responsible for figuring out what's actually happening in your own body simply because no one else is going to.

Eventually, I refused to accept it and decided I would spend everything I had trying to find a way out of the maze.

One thing I had in my favour was my research brain. I started reading the way I read for my PhD. Countless neurology papers on PubMed. Neuroscience. Mast cell biology. Mitochondrial medicine. Thalamocortical dysrhythmia. In short, I became the kind of patient that doctors hate. I read the literature on withdrawal that the prescribing guidelines don't reference. The literature on acute viral insult.

It took months before I had working hypotheses. I tested and re-tested. The hypotheses were specific, though unfashionable, and many of them demonstrated efficacy better than what I'd been told to expect.

Many of the treatments I'd been reading about didn't exist within driving distance of my home. So I bought a car that I could live out of and drove around North America to find the needed care. I went to Toronto for functional neurology. I went to Utah for brain imaging that wasn't available in Canada so that I could help direct targeted stimulation on particular brain regions. I went to Vancouver for a neuroplasticity protocol and intensive hyperbaric sessions that the public system refused to fund. I went to Chicago for visual rehabilitation with a clinician who actually understood what had happened to my visual cortex. And I spent time convalescing in Switzerland with dear friends who rescued me from the abyss I had fallen into and knew I needed an emotional boost to get started.

I slept in that car for much of it. Since the treatments cost what they cost, I could choose to either pay for them or pay for hotels, but not both. So I paid for the treatments.

I tried targeted protocols for tissue repair and immune modulation. Brain stimulation at parameters I had to cross-reference in the published literature because no one was offering it. Compounds that would stop the inflammatory cascades I had finally identified. Each compound was tested and chosen only if (a) there was precedent, (b) it worked, and (c) I saw progress. Mechanisms were mapped to symptoms, and combinations would be continually revised depending on what my body actually did in response. [Before this mess, I was someone who avoided taking medications at virtually any cost. Ironic, hey?]

I tracked everything — numbness, or the specific quality of the tinnitus on a given morning. What changed when I added something or took it away. AI would eventually facilitate improved pattern recognition, even though there were some misfires along the way. I needed months of data in order to isolate the patterns.

I became an expert in my own biology.

Where I am now

I'm 80-90% of where I want to be. I may never quite be finished, but this investigative process eventually became a lifeline when I saw the gains I needed. I should mention — I tried doing nothing, too, but that was simply a death sentence.

I have enough of my life back. I function well in the classroom. I can read for hours. I do not yet know where the ceiling is, and I am no longer afraid to find out.

Along the way, this work caught the attention of other coaches and clinics who invited me to help their patients navigate the same kind of process. It was immensely rewarding, and it's what led me to formalize some training — Therapeutic Coaching and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition — two credentials that matched the kinds of interventions I was already doing. My academic training had already primed me to be a determined and structured researcher.

Why this is now my work

There are more people falling through the cracks than anyone wants to admit.

In the years I spent doing this for myself, I met a lot of other people who were also doing it for themselves. They are, by a wide margin, the most knowledgeable folks I spoke to along the way. They also began when they had no choice.

And almost all of them had what I had: a cascading multi-system set of errors. Stress layered with a medication reaction, or a surgery that didn't end the way it was supposed to. The clean stories aren't the common ones.

Selfscape is essentially the process that I wish someone had handed me four years ago. It is not a clinic. It is not a replacement for care. It is the self-initiated healing work that fills in the gap between acute care and despair.

If you are in the place I was in, you know whether you need this. I am not here to try to convince anyone; merely to offer what I know I needed. It's a process that offers ways through the fog. I am here when you are ready.