The Hidden Plague and how it changed my world
“Be thankful for closed doors, detours, & roadblocks. They protect you from paths & places not meant for you”
What a precious time in history to be alive. I am forever grateful and indebted to the one and only almighty creator for giving me this incredible Human experience.
I’ve suffered from an auto-immune disease called Hidradenitis Suppurativa. Boils of all different shapes and sizes mainly under the armpits and between my thighs that tormented my life for over 12 years. They come and go in random spots, building up to the size of golf balls or bigger and then boiling open and staying open for weeks or months at a time. Unless a cure is developed in my lifetime I will most likely have it for the rest of my life. An estimated 1% of Americans have the disease, and those are only the ones that know they have it. Many people are suffering from it without knowing what they have. I feel deeply for those people and to all people suffering from Autoimmune Diseases.
Here’s how google explains it…
Hidradenitis suppurativa (hi-drad-uh-NIE-tis sup-yoo-ruh-TIE-vuh) is rare, long-term skin condition that features small, painful lumps under the skin. They typically develop where the skin rubs together, such as the armpits, the groin, between the buttocks and under the breasts. The lumps may break open and smell or cause tunnels under the skin.
Sounds nasty huh… it’s actually worse than it sounds. Google It and check out some of the pictures.
Here are some pics of my lesions in the armpits:
I tried every medicine that was thrown at me by the countless doctors and dermatologists I spent Thousands of $$$… only to destroy my stomach with antibiotics for months at a time, had the boils sliced open and injected with silver nitrite multiple times ( Super painful….burns like hell for 24 hours), picked, prodded, and fucked with every which way... i’ve used every possible soap and cream, burned it to holy hell with alcohol wipes, every type of herbal tea and even had surgery to have my sweat glands removed in my thighs… none of it worked for very long and at best gave me temporary relief… and would always come back with a vengeance and only got worse and worse over the years.
This was after being injected with Silver Nitrate which burned for over 24 hours like a furious pack of angry and hungry wolves.
Like so many suffering in agonizing pain with terrible illnesses, I couldn’t understand why this awful skin disease was given to me. What the fuck did I do to deserve this? I would pay any amount of money to rid of this fucking thing!! WHY ME!!!
But through my continued effort to connect with Hashem, I was able to stop playing the poor little victim and realized their was a greater purpose for me having this. I received inspiration from reading books on Emuna and I and decided to put what I read to the test.
I always believed the common Jewish theme’s… G-d did everything for a reason.. Everything has a purpose behind it... Everything is from G-d…. and Everything from Hashem is for the very best, right?? But how do I use this in my day to day and actually apply it to my life?
I decided to start adding a prayer saying thank you to Hashem my loving protector for giving me these lovely, juicy, smelly and oozing boils :)
At first I forced myself, even though at times I could barely keep my arm down from the pain of the flaring open boils. After a while of adding the sense of gratitude for my boils into my daily prayers something slowly crept up until one day the light bulb burst!!
Like fire flies sparking up in the darkness…
Everything in my life changed the moment I started thanking G-d for this disease
and actually BELIEVED it deep within my inner being….
He gave me this disease completely out of love so that I would focus my attention and energy on keeping my health in order. The one thing I knew for sure was that eating the processed foods and drinking the sugar drinks or worse alcohol I was consuming really set off my boils. I could feel them fire up as I would eat too much “Shit”. I have a long list of family members with diabetes, from my Dad to my cousins, aunts, grandparents…. and if I continued with the societal diet of pizzas, bagels and processed crap, No Doubt I would’ve gone down the same painful road.
Now... maybe that's not why Hashem gave me this plague, I can’t think on his level...but it 100% brought me a lot of good and positive changes regardless of the reason. The tipping point was when I had a nasty Boil that was stubbornly persisted and stayed an open sore for over 4 month’s and just wouldn’t FUCKING go away… I couldn’t live with it anymore, It was preventing me from enjoying life and that's when I hit rock bottom with My HS.
Enough is Enough! I am ready to do whatever it take to get rid of this gruesome disorder.
That’s when everything Changed.
I was researching online for the 7th million time... but this time was different. Hashem handed me a book called the “Hidden Plague” (Perfect name I thought when I saw it) Written by a lovely girl named Tara and it was about her story of overcoming HS as well as COUNTLESS other terrible... horrible….awful... diseases, most of them being Autoimmune. I read about how she put each one into remission one by way through changing her Diet and some lifestyle changes, but it was mainly her diet.
That book changed my entire perspective on how to approach this mothersucker, and started the most incredible positive cycle loop in my life to date.
Donna Jackson speaks to autoimmunity very nicely:
The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance
Scientists worldwide puzzle over an alarming rise in the rates of autoimmune disease, while the media remain mute.
By Donna Jackson Nakazawa / Touchstone/Simon
Despite the prevalence of autoimmune disease, surveys show that more than 90 percent of people cannot summon the name of a single autoimmune disease when asked to name one specifically.
Other than walkathons for multiple sclerosis, how many fundraising walks or lapel ribbons have you seen for autoimmune disease in general? Nearly 24 million Americans are suffering from an autoimmune illness, yet nine out of 10 Americans cannot name a single one of these diseases.
Each of these nearly 100 autoimmune diseases derails lives. Taken collectively, these diseases, which also include type 1 diabetes, Graves' disease, vasculitis, myasthenia gravis, connective tissue diseases, autoimmune Addison's disease, vitiligo, rheumatoid arthritis, hemolytic anemia, celiac disease, and scleroderma are now the Number Two cause of chronic illness in America and the third leading cause of Social Security disability behind heart disease and cancer. (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, by contrast, is not an autoimmune disease; in fact, it is entirely different. In AIDS a virus attacks the immune system and destroys it, whereas in autoimmune disease, the immune system leads the attack, mistaking the body's tissue for an invader and turning on the body itself.)
Autoimmune diseases are the eighth leading cause of death among women, shortening the average patient's lifespan by fifteen years. Not surprisingly, the economic burden is staggering: autoimmune diseases represent a yearly health-care burden of more than $120 billion, compared to the yearly health-care burden of $70 billion for direct medical costs for cancer.
To underscore these numbers, consider: while 2.2 million women are living with breast cancer and 7.2 million women have coronary disease, an estimated 9.8 million women are afflicted with one of the seven more common autoimmune diseases: lupus, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, Sjogren's syndrome, and type 1 diabetes. All of these can lead to potentially fatal complications.
Or slice these statistics another way: while one in 69 women below the age of 50 will be diagnosed with breast cancer, according to estimates, as many as one in nine women of childbearing years will be diagnosed with an autoimmune illness, which strike three times as many women as men -- and most often strike patients in their prime. According to the National Institutes of Health, autoimmune disease affects far more patients than the 9 million Americans who have cancer and the 16 million with coronary disease.
"The Western Disease": A Rising Epidemic Underrecognized and Under Addressed
I will walk you through my story and hope it helps you in someway whether you are suffering from an autoimmune disorder or if you just want to feel healthier in your mind body and soul.
The main lesson I took away from the book was that Autoimmunity simply means
My body is doing it to itself and ONLY MY BODY can undo it!
NOTHING EXTERNAL WILL EVER WORK!!!
There is no medicine or cream or anything else that would ever fix this, the problem started from the inside and it Must be fixed from the inside
NO MAGIC PILL!!! NO QUICK FIX!!!! NO SILVER BULLET …
Sorry….
But I'm actually not sorry...
Not a single doctor spoke to me about diet, about nutrition and what foods are good for the disease and which ones to stay away from. The most CRITICAL ELEMENT to helping me get better and NOT 1 SINGLE MENTION IN 12 YEARS!!!! All types of doctors, dermatologists, even holistic docs, and not one of them spent more than 60 seconds on my actual daily intake of nutrients that make up and allow my body to function properly.
Through strict diet and disciplined exercise regimen I was able to completely change my life for the better. But by far the most important ingredient was my consistency with talking to G-d on a daily basis and building my Emuna muscles. I was able to start unlocking the real me, and I know you can too with...
Combination of FAITH, Diet, and Discipline were the key ingredients.
After suffering with HS for over 12 years, on and off pretty much every single month, I finally found the recipe to put it into remission. It took me a good 3 months of super strict daily intake until all my boils fully went away, and stayed away for a good few months. I looked better, felt better, about 15 pounds lighter, my mind was clearer, and I was way Happier and more full of Joy than any other time in my life. I was free to workout and exercise how I wanted, and life felt fresher than ever.
I realized all suffering is a test of faith from G-d. He is trying to wake us up and put us on the right path. To come back and reconnect with him. Unfortunately we mostly only open and speak with our amazing creator when things are bad, and usually not when things are going good. So, he gives us “bad” times to bring us back into his loving arms.
After all those years of failing over and over and over again, I finally passed! I achieved my goal! I put my boils in remission for over 3 months!
And Then I got complacent....
I started falling back into old habits. Even though I still looked and felt much better, they came back, this time not as bad but these are still open boils/sores were talking about …
As i’m writing this i have one big boil directly in the center of my right armpit with thick greenish/yellowish pus oozing out, along with two small annoying ones towards the top of my armpit. Under my left, one early stage lump toward the top and one half under the armpit and half hugging my chest… I also have an open boil on my upper right thigh and another open one just under my right testicule... those two seem to like each other, I get a pleasant stinging sensation that makes me feel like throwing up every time the open wounds touch…. The one under my testies is bright red and super inflamed at the moment. On the other side I have one just starting to blossom and come into its own..
They have most certainly been re-activated due to falling back into my habit of eating unhealthy foods and sugars that destroy my Gut. I failed yet again…Yippity Skippity!!!
But the difference now from all other times…
If there was a cure and you paid me to take it, I wouldn’t do it!
I recognized that G-d gave me a built in system to keep me in check for the rest of my life! Any time I step out of line and eat things I shouldn’t be, I get a beautiful reminder in the form of a Luscious HS Boil.
If you're still interested to see what happens next, Check out my next post coming soon about how I slayed my Dragon...
very informative
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