I wrote on the topic of Epstein Barr about a year ago when I asked the question “Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue – are they Epstein Barr?” Revisiting that post a year later, its quite starting how the chapter I read in Anthony William’s book back then rings true, not just for how EPV unwrapped itself in my body over the course of thirty years but also how its developed since I wrote that blog and the way in which all the supplement and food recommendations he gives seem completely nail-on-head with my experience of steady recovery. Though I didn’t stop the virus in its tracks just through joining these dots, my year has been like watching one of those massive juggernauts making a giant u-turn in the road and I find I am pointing in a somewhat different direction as I reach the end of another year…and such can we all hope for when turning around a significant health challenge.

I mentioned William’s book “Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal” in that original post but, in hindsight, feel I didn’t flag it up as much as it deserved. The book was a massive breakthrough for me in that it confirmed a lurking suspicion I had started to form and made sense of it in ways I might otherwise have struggled with for the longest time. It also (I see in hindsight) served like a torch shining a light back over the course of my health history…and, importantly, a very clear light forwards.

Through his chapter on EBV, I was able to discern that my health crash in my 30s was very-likely EBV Stage Three where the virus settles into one of your body organs, such as your liver or spleen (parts of me that flagged up repeatedly for attention during numerous energetic healing sessions during the fibromyalgia years). Though doctors may test for EPV during this stage, this will show only antibodies indicating that you have had EPV in the past (yes, I had) and so they consider this ancient history thus irrelevant to their current investigations. The reality is that the virus is now hiding, taking advantage of moments when you are under stress and triggering off a whole barrage of new symptoms that perplex the doctors and you until you almost feel like you are losing your grip on reality. What is probably being labeled extreme hypochondria or one those labels we know so well (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, lupus…) is likely an oportunist virus that has made its home in one of the deepest, darkest corners of your body. Even your built-in immunity switches off since the body is convinced it is no longer under attack…except, from within, a variety of stealthy maneuvers are underway that seriously mess with your health, not to mention that you are swooning beneath all the toxic waste-products that are generated by the virus itself as it lives in your body like a squatter generating so much rubbish and excrement.

I refer you to Anthony William’s book to read much more about all this (which triggered off lightbulbs for me) but key, in my case, is that the virus often carparks in the thyroid…which is something that I kept coming back to time and time again and without being able to pinpoint why this part of me felt like an issue (and nothing doctors could test for was flagging it up either). By the end of 2014, my thyroid was the very focus of my pet theories; I felt just so washed out for no apparent reason and certain unlikely foods would tip me right over the blood-sugar balance. However, by the beginning of 2015, a whole new health landscape was appearing on the horizon and all my focus switched to that…

It was at the beginning of 2015 that I experienced my first real “electrical” symptoms; bizarre neurological issues that I’ve written about here many times before. For a time, I had both the alternating crashing energy and these new pains and sensitivities going off but, by the end of 2015, the neurological aspect had throughly taken over. As I review 2016, I realise that – apart from some very infrequent flare-ups of muscle pain and fatigue, I very nearly feel recovered now….apart from these very acute neurological symptoms which are, in the context of a decade’s health challenges, relatively new to me. In my lowest moments it would hit me: how frustrating, to be almost at the finish post of recovery and have this new thing come and trip me in my final lap.

In fact, the only time my health really crashes in the old way now is when I am under some sort of stress – be it emotional, circumstantial or something triggered by the weather and seasons (perhaps more than one of these at once, that old one-plus-one scenario that I’ve mentioned before). When this happens…as it did this week…its like the horrible old days when I feel in so much pain and exhaustion I can hardly function; even wearing clothes or putting my head on a pillow hurts and I’m flat out of energy. Also, my lymph glands feel so tender – which is an old symptom from the early days of fibromyalgia, and my tinnitus is off the scale, almost intolerable (a classic symptom of EBV in the inner ear’s nerve channel, interestingly called the labyrinth according to Anthony William). In fact, I’ve been having dizzy spells and brain fog, heart palpitations and chest pain – all itemised in the book and familiar from the last big flare-up. All of this feels distinctly like an EBV opportunist moment has occurred; its seen a chance to come out of hiding and become very active again in my body so I’m having to wheel out all the old protocol for mitigating the effects and recovering my balance before it becomes chronic.

As for those “new” neurological symptoms; these are a clear sign the EPV has reached Stage Four which, to quote Anthony William, is when the virus reaches its ultimate goal which is “to leave your thyroid and inflame your central nervous system”. It looks for damaged nerves and “grabs onto them”, where it can stay for years causing continual pain…if you let it. While episodes of extreme and inexplicable pain (in addition to chronic fatigue) has been part of my picture for years now, it tended to materialise as inflammation affecting whole areas of my muscular biology. Since early 2015, its as though this pain became sharper, more associated with the nerve endings, so that my whole system feels like its being subjected to sharp needles and splinters of glass. This is when my body started reacting to electro-magnetic stimuli like they were invaders coming to harm me; I was starting to register the subtle and unseeable energetics at work in my environment (frequencies) as agonising shards of high-pitched provocation when they would otherwise have been soft, fluid  sensations welcomed and registered by my energy body.

My  sense of what was happening to me, knowing what I do about myelin sheath, is that it was like being forced to send “raw” nerve endings “out there” where they register every single thing going on in my environment (which – as a super-sensitive person – I really do!) with no cushioning interface, no protective “rubber tyres”, as myelin is to our nerves, evolved so that we can safely register what is extra-human inside our biological cells without sparks flying; all because, where myeline sheath used to be, EBV has taken over. An analogy that comes to mind is that its like sticking fingers outside of your sleeves when you have no gloves on and the weather is sub-zero; it HURTS! My nervous system started to feel brittle and like its nerve endings were shattering or snapping off in the currents of my experience; so it made me recoil from life even further since the everyday stimuli of my environment were being registered as so much pain. My sense, also, is that the more I withdrew, the more the EBV got what it wanted since I joined it in its reclusiveness and it could piggy-back off my low morale; like that old phrase “misery loves company”…

The good news – no, the great news – on reviewing this chapter in William’s book is that, a year on, I can see how things got much worse and then so much better. At the start of the year, I was at a loss as to what to do next and was spiralling down into fear about the symptoms I had. Yet I kept my (relative) calm, made changes in my environment but – most importantly – in me and can report that I am so much better. The big things have been though diet, supplementation and lifestyle. I know that removing the voluntary toxin of alcohol (which I gave up completely last December) has been a huge player in my steady recovery since even just the occasional glass of wine meant adding to my toxic load (in effect, joining in with the EPV) rather than supporting my own recovery. Scanning down the recommended foods and supplements listed in the book today, I notice how I already eat/take many of these  recommendations – some added quite recently – like the gallons of licorice tea I have started consuming this year, by choice, though I hadn’t made the connection with William’s book so maybe something stuck without realising (I chose licorice  for its phyto-oestrogenic properties and I genuinely love the tea now even though I used to shudder at the taste of licorice; which tells me my body is welcoming it). Again, I recommend reading the chapter in the book for yourself to get the most benefit out of his recommendations, all of which are simple and affordable additions to anyone’s consumption and on the strength of which he claims that full recovery is completely possible (and I believe it).

The big change is how much more tolerant I am of electro-magnetic environments. For instance, for a couple of months now, I have managed to go out into public places, like shopping malls, without the pain episodes or sudden waves of chronic fatigue that I used to experience. The result is, I’m doing more, getting involved more, getting out more. Extreme pain episodes have been brief and rare for four months now. Until this brief crash, I have had far more energy this autumn than ever; in fact, my creative flow, my stamina and my self-driven desire to get many exciting things done has been much more like how I feel in the spring when my viral load is always at its lightest. Sensitivity to computer technology has lessened (if not gone) with a measured approach to using it and I am generally less sensitive to everyday EMFs. How much of this is to do with my daily dose of lion’s mane mushrooms (as per my earlier post Repairing Your Myelin) I will probably never know but I feel it is related!

The key to all this is owning it, seeing it and working with it. As Anthony William says, “much of EBV’s effectiveness stems from hiding in the shadows so that neither you nor your body’s immune system can sense its presence”. While tacitly agreeing to this status quo by not seeing it is going on, I am – effectively – signing up for long term disruption, low self-esteem and confusion around my ongoing health challenges and a long-running situation of not claiming my own body for myself. Its like allowing those squatters I referred to above to move in and trash my house. Funny how, whenever I have an EPV virus flare-up I seem to have a simultaneous issue with pests around my property; our neighbourhood has an ongoing challenge with rats and, cute though they are as they munch bird seed from the table, I also know what its like to have them move into the wall cavities and loft spaces of your house! I’ve tried the Buddhist approach for many weeks – live and let live or try and love them away – but as the weather grows cold and they are now climbing my walls, I’ve had to take firmer action steps in order to set boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not and healing from EPV is like that too.

Yet its interesting that once you start to see this virus as something that has its own agenda, which is to live somewhere that it  can be warm and safe and has food delivered to it, all its needs met without having to go outside, it is just another life-force crying out for our attention; so an opportunity to be worked with at the energetic level…as well as the practical level. We can do this by helping it to want to come right out into the open to the degree that it transmutes into something else (at the end of which it will not be residing in your body in its current form). I can even recognise aspects of myself that it is mirroring back at me as I perpetually white-knuckle grip on to an urge to “not be seen”, to be warm and safe (yet more and more minutely in control of my environment) that I know isn’t in my highest interests and yet its all I know as safety. Just as I long to evolve that reality, I choose to assume the EBV will welcome such an opportunity and am prepared to work with it at that level of its transformation.

We get to do this by holding its hand, as it were, and helping it to the light “on the inside” through our positive thought process (noticing how it gorges out the most on our negative, downward-spiralling thoughts and weaker moments), in partnership with the practical steps we are taking “on the outside” such as lighter food choices and great supplements. This inner alchemy is exactly what I intend to continuing bringing to the table, as I have been doing all year, with such impressive results; not seeking to destroy it or be at war with it but setting boundaries, acknowledging the virus’s own fears (as it were) and then visualising a process of transformation taking place whilst adding in even more food-healing from William’s list.

Its been an interesting review of where I’ve been and how far I’ve come in a year of tackling my recovery a new-enlightened way.  Re-reading the chapter of the book, I see how I barely skim-read it a year ago as I felt just so overwhelmed by what this Stage Four virus meant and what I was “taking on”. Yet I see,  looking back, that I instinctively walked much of that recovery route on my own intuition; I didn’t give up drink “because” of this and yet it was patently the right thing to do; and I didn’t choose licorice tea as my new favourite because it was recommended and yet there it is, my three times a day drink now. I’ve been eating lighter and more raw all year (and craving this with every fibre of my being) yet this couldnt have been a better choice; not least all those organic celery sticks I love to munch on as a snack. Its as though, once you step onto this new trajectory of healing, your whole system gets on board, feeding you all the nudges and clues you need to heal yourself.

For the complete protocol of healing foods for tackling this or any chronic health issue the positive way, I highly recommend reading the key book I’ve been talking about here as well as Anthony William’s new book, “Life Changing Foods”, which  I’m assured will be in my christmas stocking. Here’s to so many of us making that leap from recovering to THRIVING in 2017, something which I sense is entirely possible and very much within our reach.

Medical Medium website (and I recommend following Anthony William’s useful posts and tips on Facebook and Instagram)

Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal

Medical Medium Life-Changing Foods: Save Yourself and the Ones You Love with the Hidden Healing Powers of Fruits & Vegetables