I have had bad allergies and asthma my whole life. Animals and cold weather and seasonal triggers would make it worse. I learned to live with it and had an inhaler that I used for rescue from the asthma attacks and I took allergy medications pretty frequently. I had to switch pretty regularly with the allergy medications because I used them so much. They would work great for a while and then my body no longer responded to them and I would have to switch.
I tried allergy shots when I was in high school and had so many bad reactions to the serum in the shots. I remember many times where I would have trouble breathing after the shots and they would have to give me a shot of Adrenalin. I would shake for the rest of the day and I hated it. I wasn’t seeing that the shots were really helping me so I quit them in college. I went back to the oral antihistamines and the rescue inhaler to treat myself when the symptoms got bad.
When I got married, my husband and I moved down to Kansas for his job. While in Kansas, I had a little spot/rash appear on my arm and didn’t really think anything of it but it grew. It kept getting bigger and eventually the rash was all over my upper body, especially around my mouth. The rash continued spreading until it was all over my face, neck, upper chest, down both arms, behind my knees and on my feet.
My skin at this point was red, rough, thickened by itching, flaky and cracked. I remember that taking showers was so painful because the water would hit the cracks and I would yell out in pain. I was put on prednisone more times than I care to count. The prednisone, which is a steroid, would clear me up amazingly but as soon as I came off of it, the rash would come back in full force, worse than it had been before.
My husband and I tried so many things at this point. We were going to doctor after doctor and not getting any answers to what was causing this. We got told that it was eczema and I would have it for the rest of my life and just to learn to live with it. We were prescribed lotions and creams and oral medications to help deal with the symptoms. I was finishing my nursing degree at this time in Kansas and I remember that my instructors seemed to always give me patients who were blind, struggling with dementia, or unconscious.
I also remember being in a restaurant, waiting for my food in line and having people move from beside me to another line across the building. I felt rejected and ostracized.
We finally made the decision to move back up north to Wisconsin thinking it might be the state of Kansas that I was reacting to. Turns out, it wasn’t the state of Kansas. We moved back home, got jobs and the rash continued. It would ebb and flow, getting worse at times and then better at times but I couldn’t pinpoint what was making the changes. After working in the clinic as a nurse for probably 9 years and dealing with this on and off. I was diagnosed with high cholesterol, on top of everything else.
The doctors said that I wouldn’t be able to lower my cholesterol on my own and would have to be on medication. That didn’t sit well with me because I had seen that medication hadn’t fixed the rash problem, just covered it up. So, I started researching and I came across information on nutrition. I made some major changes to my diet at that time, all cholesterol related still. I saw my numbers drop. This lead me to wonder and I started becoming disenchanted with the medical field and curious about nutrition and its effects on the body.
This lead to my nutrition studies at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and that lead me to Nutrition Response Testing®. I took a weekend course, signed up for a program and two years later have so many answers to the problems that I was going through.
My practitioner, Drew Detzner with Langlois Vital Nutrition Center in Brookfield, WI showed me through this technique that my immune system was compromised as well as various organs in my body that were stressed and unable to do what they were made to do in my body and this was creating all the symptoms that I was experiencing. Working alongside Drew, I was able to reconnect with my body, learn its signals, understand that I react to certain foods and those foods were causing the skin rash and the asthma and the allergies.
Nutrition Response Testing® really saved my life. It has given me freedom. There is no wondering what is causing the symptoms anymore, I know so much more now about my body and how unique it is. Friends and family have seen the changes in me. There is no denying that this has given me my life back. Now I am a practitioner, helping others to have a success story just like mine.