I lost my mind after surgery - here is how I recovered.

In April 2022 I had a 6-hour long, difficult, lung surgery due to a complicated and very advanced pneumothorax (holes in my lung that then had the lung collapse & push against my heart for 7 full days before I realised & went to hospital).

I wrote about it after I came out of the hospital and I was not only extremely happy to still be alive (which I was told way too often I shouldn't have been)

- but I was also highly motivated for life, my business -- and just myself.

Or so I thought. Let me explain.

I have a history of (previous & ongoing) chronic health issues, born with various difficult health problems such as kidney reflux, a shrinking kidney, neurological disorders, epileptic seizures and more...

In the Western world, we treat everything immediately with medication but forget that those kill the intricate system that your body was built from ... nature.

The more you take, the more it destroys.

As a child, I was given everything from painkillers to anti-vomit pills, to the highest dose of antibiotics an adult(!) would get... to morphine, and other opioids on different occasions and for an extensive amount of times.

Let's not talk about how this could have made me an addict for life. But that's a topic for another time. And I am not, but that was not the doctors' work.

Medication destroys the body, mind and soul

- and I stand by that. Of course, there's a lot of nuance to it. Because it can also save lives.

I am talking about the mass use, the long-term application that doesn't change or help or even address the symptom let alone the root cause, the thoughtless prescription and the ignorance of any holistic approach before giving medicine.

When I was a child, that didn't seem to be of knowledge to the many doctors I saw, and if it was then they didn't care enough to do something about it.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now (given the time and place I was born in).

Now in 2023, this should be public knowledge everywhere, and it should be addressed as such.

Anyway.

Due to my history, medication has destroyed a lot of my body, mind and soul. And in the past 20ish years I have been on a (very long) journey to recover from, reverse and heal those damages...

So when I was told I would need lung surgery with general anaesthesia you can imagine how I felt: defeated.

It's not so common knowledge that general anaesthesia can have pretty dramatic side effects (and long-lasting ones too!) such as depression, identity loss/shifts, anxiety disorder, long-term changes in your brain and more ...

Going in I was prepared and set up for a 2 hour surgery. When I got out of surgery I was told it took over 6 hours and the GA had to be topped up.

No wonder I vomited right in front of the room just an hour later. My body already signalled to me that it wanted to get rid of whatever was injected.

Fast forward to 10 days later, my lung is healed, my wounds are closed and the doctor declares this is all a miracle he's never seen before.

But that's where the real struggle began.

In the coming 15 months, I felt the full effect of the GA, so much so that I started to deeply doubt myself.

It started with me suddenly being exhausted & fatigued to a point where it was difficult to sit on my desk, about a month or 2 after the surgery.

I then had extreme brain fog to the point where I thought I just simply didn't "try hard enough" - yes the good old gaslighting.

The nerve pain that I had previously gotten much better with, started to really flare up and get partially unbearable. I also started reacting to foods in ways I didn't before.

My sensory processing issues got worse, and I was way faster way more overstimulated than I used to.

I basically had 0 tolerance.

My nervous system was shot and stuck in fight/flight (more in fight really).

As the year went on, I lost 'friendships' along the way and struggled to understand who the hell I even am now because ... this wasn't me.

My mind went absolutely mad with negative thought spirals, I felt frustrated and even bitter at times.

What would take me a few hours to work on now took me 5 days and even though I used to be able to do hard things in any way (heck I LIVED for hard things my whole life) - my brain suddenly refused to do just anything that was slightly uncomfortable.

I was not only out of capacity but I was so deep in capacity-dept I didn't know how to recover it.

Here I was, the Holistic High Performance coach, struggling with all of the above -- and not knowing how to help myself.

The hardest part? I died more identity deaths in these 15 months than I have in the past 36 years of my life or during my actual clinical deaths and out-of-body experiences.

This was extremely tough (and honestly sometimes still is because I just don't know who I am on some days - and uncertainty apparently isn't my favourite these days)

Add the imposter syndrome and the "not good enough" feelings ...because didn't I have enough to worry about at this point?

Side note: for those of you who think that was depression, it was not. For those of you who don't believe general anaesthesia can cause all of this, please go and actually research about it (not just googling or asking ChatGPT about it ... I mean read scientific papers, talk to scientists, doctors etc who work in this field... I did)

So what did I do to get out of this?

In the last 4 months I have done a few things that truly helped detox from the GA, help with the nerve pain (I broke the record and have been pain-free for 8 weeks ) and get back more of my capacity and cognitive brain function than I had in the 12 months prior.

1| NUTRITION

I am extremely blessed to have a friend who's an amazing nutritionist and health expert who helped me with an elimination diet and to really trial & error what my body reacts to.

I know have some solid foods I can eat without issues and that doesn't trigger any inflammation.

2| MOVEMENT

Getting back into exercise even if just 10-20min a day. I have been a high performance athlete for half of my life so being in a state where having to do sports feels so daunting is absolutely sad but it is what it is and I'll work my way up to more sporty times again.

3| HEAVY METAL DETOX

I can not STRESS enough how much heavy metals, toxins and residue from meds are left in your body (and in the brain!!) long-term and literally messing with you ... I am not going to suggest how you do it - there's literature out there and there's clear evidence of what works. But please go do it. Even if you don't have issues (yet). Start before you have it.

4| BRAIN REPROGRAMMING

If you believe it or not, I did use some tools I actually knew and used with my clients so I wasn't as "useless" as I thought

If you followed me for a while you know that I keep learning and studying neuroscience, psychology and the intersection of the 2.

When I started to research more on the effects on the brain that GA has, I was not only shocked but clearly I had to do something. You can use neuroplasticity to reprogram almost anything in your brain.

I am using it for my nerve pain as well as the side effects I went through and step by step teaches my brain new ways of thinking, behaving and reacting to certain circumstances, feelings and thoughts.

5| WRITING

I write about my experience, not just now and here but sometimes I start writing to get the thoughts out of my head, and I realise certain things about what I experience, where it comes from and I can get a new perspective or solutions because it's like I stepped out of my brain to look at my thoughts.

I hope this helps someone out there to understand how difficult recovery (from any major health crisis or difficult experience) can be and I hope this gives you some hope and helpful information.

Do you have any questions? Let me know below and I try my best to answer them for you.