Month: February 2020

PART 2

To continue from the previous blog, I wanted to give you an update on where I am now, following my Patent Foramen Ovale closure surgery, but also answer some of the questions you have had since the first post. Welcome to part 2.

Best Chiropractor - Wholehearted Part 2- Dr Erica Peabody
November 21, 2019

In August of 2019, I was at my regular yearly check-up with my primary care physician. Now when I say “regularly yearly check-up” I haven’t been to anything “regular” and “yearly” except to see my chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner in years. Being a spouse of a GM employee required that I do certain things on that insurance and so I am following the rules.

When I was in that appointment, I said to her, “I know I have a hole in my heart. I may be planning to have my own family in the next couple years and I would like to pursue getting is closed ahead of time.” I had a different cardiologist recommended to me but she told me to absolutely go back to the same one I saw before and that he is the greatest in this region.

One test was redone and a few more tests were added to the mix to determine exactly the size and location. Funny and not funny part of this is that I happen to be a healthcare provider and also in good health inside of a cardiologist’s office and so they sort of took it for granted that I would already know how this whole thing would go.

I asked questions along the way, and although I didn’t get “blown off” it was more like “of course yes that happens…” and “of course no way it would go that way…” was always the attitude. Which ended up probably being a test to me and my ability to trust.

I am a generally trustworthy kind of person and so I just turned it all over to them to do what they needed to do and know that I was in the best care in the region. On that I settled in, navigated through it all and am now here to tell the story on the other side.

Many have asked “How are you feeling now?”

I feel GREAT!!! I truly do. Instantaneously following surgery my hands and feet were warm for the first time in my entire life. I remember back in chiropractic college, my fellow classmates would always mention just how cold my hands all the time. I didn’t know any better so I had no idea it was even an issue.

Best Chiropractor - Part 2 - Dr Erica Peabody - Kilimanjaro

By this point in the game, 12 weeks out from surgery, I have skipped what I would count to be 9 migraine headaches (I’m tallying this due to my history of roughly 3 per month). I haven’t had even one. I don’t even get any headaches that I know of anymore, or nothing that I would even count as a tension or cluster headache.

I am able to workout and do what I want to do at this point and feel pretty amazing. Three weeks ago I started back at step aerobic class and looking back on teaching step for over a decade of my life, I feel incredible. The step I take now I can keep up with the HIIT moves and can actually do a burpee without blacking out!!!

I will begin to run again soon. If you have been to my office, you can see my collection of participation medals although not many from anytime recently. I will know more once I begin to train for the CRIM this year, it is a race I have done numerous times and I am curious to see if my finishing times improve and just how well I recover. I will begin back to the triathlon sport as well and look forward to seeing how my swimming progresses.

If you have followed this blog at all, you know that I had a severe foot injury following my summit of Mt Kilimanjaro back in 2017. (I have added the video log link below in case you missed it thus far…it was EPIC!!)

I wore a walking boot for 6 solid months and have been working with that foot at about 80% healed. Now I am beginning to not even have to think about it at all…warm hands and feet mean that blood supply is actually going to my feet at a better rate and I AM HEALING!!!

I truly feel great and I am so, so, so, so grateful to have been a candidate for the closure as I just know for the next decades of my life, I will be far better off.

One of the questions I have gotten a few times along the way is “how do I find out if I have this or not?” as a few of you may be suspecting something similar for yourself now listening to this story. I have to send you right back to your own general practitioner to get that resolved.

The recovery has been amazing and pretty simple for the most part. The cardiologist had me on a blood thinner since the anatomy of the heart changed and has since taken me off to proceed into my life exactly as I want to.

Dr Erica Peabody - Part 2 - Best Chiropractor Fenton Michigan

Your words of encouragement as well and your good wishes are appreciated more than I can really say in words here on this blog. It has been quite an experience and I hope that my sharing this information, that you feel a little more informed and educated about the possibilities.

Of course, all along I have continued chiropractic care, massage therapy and stayed in touch with my functional medicine practitioner. I have continued yoga and meditation and am now back at full capacity in the gym. In essence, I have done the things that we talk about in the practice all the time: eat well, move well and think well. These are truly the keys to optimizing the body and it’s inborn ability to heal, and even more critical to healing from something like that.

Thanks for checking back for part 2 and stay in touch as time progresses…there is a lot more to share!

WHOLEHEARTED

I am living wholehearted.

I am nine weeks post heart surgery. It feels crazy to even be able to say something like that and it has been an incredible shift in my life!

Best Chiropractor Fenton Michigan - Wholehearted - Dr Erica Peabody

14 years ago I was diagnosed with what is called a Patent Foramen Ovale, a congenital heart defect that is present in twenty percent of the population. Many go un-diagnosed and often the first sign is stroke. I feel very fortunate to know this info and I also feel really fortunate that I didn’t have to have a serious incident in order to get this information.

Playing sports growing up, there was clearly something wrong but they just lumped it into the group called “exercise induced asthma” and “when you start gasping and wheezing (which was happening all the time on the soccer field especially) take this inhaler.”

The inhaler never worked, never made a difference except just to make me shake…and be more frustrated because I still couldn’t catch my breath. I continued to play sports and excelled regardless.

When I was 12 years old, I started getting migraine headaches. I can remember my very first one as I woke up around 2am one morning and told my parents “It feels like a bowling ball hit me in the side of my head.” At 12, those were the best words that I could come up with to describe that pain. The migraines have happened anywhere between 2-10 per month since then.

I am sure there are some migraine sufferers out there reading this that know the kind of pain I am talking about, debilitating to say the least. I learned through the years just to deal with them and after the first few years, I still had the same level of pain but I never let it stop me. Life, school, tests, finals, patient care…nothing stops just because I have a headache and pushing through all of it has always been the way I handled them…and most other things in my life.

Best Chiropractor - Wholehearted - Dr Erica Peabody
they made me lay on my back for 8 solid hours following my surgery which was the hardest part

Shortness of breath upon exertion and migraine headaches, combined with numbness into my hands (which would come and go since my late teenage years) are the classic symptom group for Patent Foramen Ovale and I tested positive. To top all of these symptoms off, chronic hypoxia (lack of oxygen) was the over-riding theme since the blood would just skip the trip to the lungs altogether. On a scale of 1-5 for the size of the hole, I tested as a 4.

I scheduled to see the cardiologist 14 years ago and was looking forward to having all of these things improve for me through a surgical procedure where they inserted a patch in the heart. His exact words “I make a lot of money doing these patches but we do not have the research of what happens to the current devices 30-40 years down the road and so if you are not suffering every single day, don’t do it.”

I was bummed because I was truly looking forward to a shift for me, but I was going to listen to the expert.

I revisited the idea and the tests and all of the procedures this past fall. When I went back to the same cardiologist he said “We have the BEST devices now and so YES!!! …considering how you test and just how compromised you are, lets do it!”

I know what you are thinking out there, “How compromised is she? She has done all these things with a hole in her heart, long distance running and biking, hot yoga, taught aerobics classes for 10 years, even climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro! How is that possible?”

I am (well was) VERY compromised but was going to do all the things anyway because that is the fabric I am built from. I do my best not to let anything slow me down.

November 21, 2019 I went under the knife. This is the procedure they did.

The cardiologist wanted me to take on Thursday off work to have the procedure done, stay the night, go home Friday and head back into work on Monday the 25th. Unbelievable to me in the moment he had said that but that is exactly what I did, and I probably saw many of you that day!

I didn’t share much about this ahead of time for the simple fact that the words “heart surgery” freak most people out. I wanted to get through it, survive it and then tell the story when I can really share the details.

This post is getting lengthy and so I will leave this info here for now and then I will share more in the next post.

When you take a moment to do the math of chronic hypoxia my entire life and never slowing down, to getting full amount of oxygen moving forward, you can see how great of a thing this is and the how freakin’ incredible the medical profession is to be able to develop a fix like that video I shared. Literally I am now finally living wholehearted.