It took surviving pulmonary embolism and oxygen deprivation brain injury at 32 for the resilience factor to kick in and turn on my persistent self-advocacy. If you’ve ever been in a place of feeling like you’re in an emotional rainstorm most of the time without a definitive cause, that no medication regimen or hours taking with a therapist can relieve for long, that’s where I was in my 20s.

I only started to learn about the physical conditions leading to the injury compared with the physical conditions of recovery I was then in the process of moving through within 1 1/2 years of it.

Causative factors on the standard medical side include the view of “there’s a pharmaceutical solution for everything” that it didn’t occur to me to question about the long term antibiotics prescription for acne from ages 13-18, and even less capacity to ask and get answers about alternatives to the number of mood stabilizing medications prescribed/taken/developed dependence on/dosage stopped working in my 20s.

No medical professionals I saw at the time had anything to say about nutrition. That as a first approach to treatment would have been the foundation of a much better outcome.

In fact, looking back, improving my nutrition in tandem with 8 months of twice weekly neurofeedback sessions set the conditions for anxiety remission and discontinuing all long term pharmaceutical use (blood thinner Xarelto being the only exception).