As many of you know, last year in May, Jonathan and I started the process of being approved to adopt from foster care.
The topic of parenthood has been a painful one for us for a long time.
When we first got married, we thought we would buy a single family home on some land, Jonathan would start his own business, we’d have children in 2-3 years, and I would stay home and homeschool. Life couldn’t have gone more differently.
Right away, we were in an uphill battle trying to get Jonathan’s many long-standing chronic illnesses under control.
By our second anniversary, we were dealing with catastrophic circumstances. Water damage and black mold in the first home we bought, and subsequently it falling apart, forcing us to move. Jonathan’s joints getting so bad he thought he was going to lose his job. My late stage neurological Lyme disease symptoms growing worse as I went 4 1/2 years without being diagnosed or treated. Me contracting Tick Borne Relapsing Fever, developing chronic meningitis, and being close to bedbound for half a year and very weak for most of 2020 as I waited for the treatment to help me recover.
Before our third anniversary, COVID hit and impacted Jonathan’s ability to make commission at work so badly that it cut his income in almost half, and that impact lasted over 2 years. Shortly after, we found out we could not have biological children due to a genetic condition. We were completely devastated at the time, and so confused about our future.
3.5 years into our marriage, we got COVID for the first time. I developed complications and was hospitalized, ending up with POTS, a neurological autoimmune disease, and a weakened immune system, all triggered by COVID, and severe PTSD from the medical trauma.
Prior to May 2023, Jonathan and I would have told you there was a solid chance we would never be able to grow our family or become parents. Too much had happened for us to want to have children anymore, though this felt like agony because we never in a million years would have imagined our lives without children.
Then in 2023, we started to notice a bit more stability with my physical health, and I was starting to experience progress in recovering from medical C-PTSD through trauma-focused therapy. I only got sick 7 times in 2023, whereas in 2022 I got sick 10 times. I was experiencing great improvement in my ability to sleep, going weeks to a month in between rough nights, and rarely needing any medication. My autoimmune flare ups were less frequent and much more manageable.
In May, Jonathan and I asked ourselves a pointed question. If my health never fully recovered and our choices were to either become parents with our physical and mental health the way it was, or never become parents at all, which would we choose?
After much long, involved discussion and praying about it together, Jonathan and I decided we wanted to pursue parenthood. Shortly after, we started the process of being approved to adopt through South Carolina foster care.
Moving forward to 2024, this has been a trying year.
Most of the health progress I experienced in 2023 seemed to vanish overnight.
I got sick five times between January and April, which caught me in a vicious cycle of constant viral infections and autoimmune flare ups. I started needing prescription medication to help reduce my autoimmune symptoms enough to allow me to sleep, at first several times a month, and by the end of April, several times a week. The side effects were horrible and included depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation in addition to headaches, brain fog, wooziness, and fatigue. The alternative would have been to not sleep (and I don’t mean not sleep well, I mean literally not sleep), which wasn’t really an option. Nothing that helped me before seemed to be making any difference anymore.
My workload at my job nearly doubled, and going through clinicals in my last semester of college doubled the amount of time and energy I had to devote to school. No exaggeration, I felt like I was trying to accomplish 80 hours of work in 40 hours a week, while still having to find time for multiple health appointments per week and taking care of my home and family. All while my health was falling apart.
I graduated from college in early May, but I could barely process the achievement due to how exhausted and sick I felt.
At the same time, Jonathan’s job situation reached an unsustainable, emergency level of stress. The extremely long days, constant overworking, understaffing, high turnover, unrealistic demands, and always having people frustrated with him for things far beyond his control took a toll. He was experiencing panic attacks and mental breakdowns nearly every morning before work and every night when he got home. The texts and calls from work never stopped, often going late into the evening and beginning early in the morning.
On top of it all, we found out a solar panel manufacturing plant was being built less than a mile away from our home. Near two new schools, Regent Park community, an amusement park, and several gas stations. If a gas leak or explosion were to happen, we would be within the evacuation zone and could be killed or severely injured. There was a likelihood we might need to sell our house and move, if the courts didn’t stop this plant from manufacturing in an area where they should not be.
With our circumstances crumbling around us, Jonathan and I made the difficult decision to pause the adoption approval process.
Our home study was about to be submitted to DSS for approval, and once we were approved, we could be matched with a child at any time.
During our adoption approval training and through talking with foster and adoptive parents, we learned that fostering and adopting from foster care is extremely stressful and takes a significant amount of bandwidth and resilience. Many people described it as the most stress they have ever experienced in their lives, or unimaginably intense stress that never, ever lets up. You have to be prepared for your life to get a lot harder and your mental and physical health a lot worse, especially in the beginning.
Jonathan and I knew it would be extremely unwise to move forward when we were in a state mentally, physically, spiritually, and circumstantially where we were already at our breaking point.
Foster children need love, of course, but they also need peaceful, stable, and secure environments where they can heal from years of trauma and loss, with parents who have high resiliency, stress tolerance, and an ability to be taxed beyond anything they could ever imagine while still remaining rock solid and physically healthy enough for the sake of their children. Jonathan and I knew we were not in the position to be able to provide this. Certainly not now, at least, and maybe not ever.
The only way I can describe how Jonathan and I felt over the summer is despairing and hopeless. We cried out to God, wondering why we found ourselves at rock bottom once again, when we thought our lives were finally going to move forward.
We wept together, having conversations no couple ever wants to have about whether parenthood would ever be possible in our future.
It felt like our lives had shattered once again, and once again, we were left trying to pick up the pieces.
Then, in the last several months, Jonathan and I began to experience the hand of God moving in our lives in the most powerful way.
The first breakthrough happened with Jonathan’s job and career dilemma.
Jonathan had been wanting to get out of the automotive industry for some time, but he felt trapped. He had not been able to go to college after graduating high school because of how sick he was at the time, and he didn’t feel it was feasible for him to go now for several reasons. Due to having Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, anything involving manual labor and many of the trades were off the table as options. Yet, without a college degree and relevant experience, an office job didn’t seem possible either.
For several years, he resigned himself to staying in the automotive industry, despite the ever increasing stress and lack of room to grow at his job.
When the stress reached an unsustainable level this year, we prayed and talked about together, and he decided he would seriously start looking for another job, though finding a way out seemed impossible.
Not long before this decision, a friend landed a new job at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). After his first couple months working there, he couldn’t say enough great things about the organization. The job itself, benefits, coworkers, and environment were all awesome, in his words.
Then, while browsing online, Jonathan found a marketing job listing from BGEA. That particular job didn’t seem like a good fit, but out of curiosity, we looked at the careers section on their website and found a job I thought would be perfect for him. The listing was for an Onboarding and Recruiting Specialist position in HR, and although the job required a bachelor’s degree and Onboarding and Recruiting experience, I truly believed his personality and skillset would fit the role very well.
He applied, with both of us knowing it was a long shot and he likely wouldn’t hear back. Well, we were wrong.
Not only did BGEA ask him to come for an interview, they ended up offering him the job.
Right before Jonathan got the job offer from BGEA, his current employer gave him a significant pay raise, which he had been waiting to receive for over a year.
This is where Jonathan had to pray fervently and trust God to lead him in the right direction.
Would he trust the job he had for many years and stay to get the raise, hoping the stress and job environment would eventually get better?
Or would he step out into uncharted waters and take this job offer from BGEA, where he would take a pay cut up front in order to gain Christian coworkers, a healthy work environment, a manageable workload, lower stress, good benefits, and room for future growth?
Jonathan felt God leading him to take the job offer from BGEA, and all of his friends and family praying with him confirmed this decision.
His new job at BGEA has been the most incredible blessing for him. He loves his coworkers, has met many new friends, is so much less stressed, is excited for future possibilities within the organization, and has even been able to join the BGEA worship team.
The second breakthrough happened with my health. It’s so incredible, I still can’t even believe it’s happening.
In August, I made an appointment with my new holistic primary care doctor for a problem I thought was unrelated to my autoimmune disease, sleep, and immune system struggles.
Since fall 2022, I had been experiencing symptoms of blood sugar imbalance. I started getting frequent, ravenous hunger where if I didn’t eat, I would feel weak, dizzy, nauseated, flulike, and like I might faint. I gained 8-10 lbs in a few months before realizing something strange was going on, and these weren’t normal hunger cues.
Switching to slightly lower carb, higher fiber foods like chickpea pasta instead of brown rice pasta, and increasing my protein from around 50 grams a day to 70-80 grams a day helped a little. Enough to feel somewhat stable in 2023, but not enough to stop the symptoms completely.
Every time I tested my fasting blood sugar in the mornings, it was normal. Typically in the 90s. This baffled me so much.
In 2024, the symptoms got worse and I gained another 5 lbs. In January and April especially, I had bouts of symptoms so severe I had to eat every 1-2 hours for several weeks at time just to be functional.
Every time I would try to cut calories (even by a small deficit) to lose some weight, the symptoms would quickly get severe, and I would end up gaining weight instead of losing.
For this reason, I made an appointment with my doctor, hoping she could help me figure out what in the world was going on.
My doctor, after hearing my explanation, wanted me to have a 14-day continous glucose monitor put in and to have my A1C and postpranial insulin tested. The results couldn’t have shocked me more.
When I put in the 14-day continous glucose monitor, I immediately got my answer.
I was hypoglycemic ALL night long, EVERY night, and much of the day.
My blood sugar would fluctate between the 40s-60s at night while I tried to sleep and during the day if I napped, and it was dropping below 70 between meals multiple times a day as well. My spikes weren’t very high either – the highest reading was in the 120s. I was experiencing sharp increases and drops whenever I ate, though.
The reason I had never been able to detect this before is apparently because I’m one of those people who experience a dawn phenomenon effect with my blood sugar. So in the morning after waking up was the one time of day my blood sugar was rising to a normal level, before dropping back down.
My A1c results came back quite low, and my postpranial insulin was very high.
My doctor said she wasn’t sure why this was happening to me, but it’s possible my pancreas sustained some damage from COVID.
I learned that hypoglycemia can not only cause the acute symptoms we are all familiar with (frequent and ravenous hunger, weight gain, weakness, dizziness, lightheadedness, nausea, etc.), but also –
- Chronic inflammation
- A compromised immune system
- Tachycardia
- Symptoms of fight or flight, adrenaline, and anxiety
- Insomnia and sleep disturbances
I felt incredibly relieved to finally have these answers, but overwhelmed about what to do next.
So I dove in and learned as much as I could about dietary strategies for hypoglycemia, as well as anything else I could find that might help.
In the last several months, I have had to make some dramatic diet changes. These include:
- Slowly and carefully add back in animal products. I have sucessfully reintroduced organic free range chicken and turkey, organic grassfed beef, and pastured eggs. This has allowed me to have enough options in my diet that I can manipulate my protein and carbohydrate intake in a way that prevents hypoglycemia most of the time.
- Include an animal product with lunch, snack, and dinner.
- Eat meals slowly over a longer period of time, so the release of insulin can be slower and easier for my body to handle.
- Increase my protein intake to 100 grams a day, divided into 25-30 grams per meal and 10-15 per snack.
- Eat smaller meals (so they’re less hard for my body to process and don’t trigger as much of an insulin release) more frequently (to prevent hypoglycemia between meals), approximately every three hours.
- Reduce my carbohydrate intake to 30-45 grams per meal and 10-15 per snack.
- Include mostly legumes and vegetables for my carbohydrate sources.
- Consume only low-glycemic and complex carbohydrates.
- Completely eliminate refined carbohydrates.
- Completely eliminate added sugar, even less processed forms like maple syrup and coconut sugar.
- Eliminate most fruit, with the exception of frozen berries and cherries in my breakfast protein smoothies.
- Switch over all of my alcohol based herbal tinctures to glycerites, because alcohol makes hypoglycemia significantly worse.
- Stop taking any supplements with hypoglycemic effects.
Making all of these diet changes has been overwhelming, to say the least. However, the effort has been 100% worthwhile because the hypoglycemia has improved so dramatically.
I am not experiencing hypoglycemia at all during the day anymore, and I’m only experiencing a couple of short dips during the night. All of my acute hypoglycemia symptoms are gone.
Not only are the numbers improving, but my health has made a 180-degree turnaround.
I am realizing this must have been an underlying root cause driving almost all of the health struggles I have been dealing with for so long.
- My sleep has improved so much that I have not needed my prescription medication for 7 weeks. So much so that not even once have I considered taking it. That’s the longest I’ve gone since 2023 at least! In that time I have mostly experienced a 50/50 mix of good and medium nights, with only one rough night (and it had a distinct cause).
- In September, Jonathan brought home several viral infections from work, and each time I felt like I might be about to get sick, but then I didn’t and my immune system successfully fought the virsues off. That hasn’t happened since before COVID!
- In October, we got a cold while at our church’s camping retreat for the Feast of Tabernacles. Yet it was so mild, and within 4 days I was completely fine and had no complications. It didn’t even cause an autoimmune flare up.
- My Autoimmune Encephalitis/PANS symptoms have been so mild, I have barely noticed anything. It’s like night and day from how I felt all year.
- My POTS symptoms have been so stable that I’ve even been able to dance for fun a little bit, for the first time since before COVID. I have been able to do about 30-60 seconds at a time if I’m careful to deep breathe and not jump or run, which may sound small, but I thought I would never be able to dance again for the rest of my life.
For the first time in so long, I feel like I am really, truly healing. I can feel it in the very depths of my body and soul. Something is changing, and I am recovering in a way I have never experienced before.
I am in such shock that I can hardly process it. This is still so new and I can’t be sure what will happen next, but I feel cautiously hopeful and curious what the future holds.
So, what’s next? Jonathan and I are ready and waiting for God to show us the next step He would have us take.
- We are praying about when to resume the adoption process. Additionally, we are praying about whether we should restart the foster care adoption process, or whether we should switch to private domestic infant adoption with a local agency.
- Albeit cautiously, we are waiting with anticipation to see what happens next with my health.
- We’re praying for answers and relief for an acute health problem Jonathan has been experiencing in the last couple of months. Something is causing swollen and inflamed lymph nodes in his neck that are pressing on nerves in the back of his head and causing a debilitating chronic headache. He has been seeing different practitioners to try and figure out what is going on, but we don’t have any solid answers yet.
- Over the last six months, we have been waiting and watching to see what happens with the Silfab Solar manufacturing plant. Develoments have been back and forth during that time. The York County Zoning board revoted on the matter, then a York County government official wrote a letter stating the revote didn’t apply to Silfab, Silfab appealed the revote in the courts, an actively involved citizen of York County filed a claim against Silfab in court, and now there are several cases against the plant going on in court now. A community opposition group called Move Silfab has developed and is working to get Silfab moved to another location any way they can.
Unfortunately, even with all of this opposition, neither York County nor the courts have ordered a cease desist, so in the meantime Silfab has been able gain all of their permits, transport materials to the site, build, and move full steam ahead.
Although it’s possible the courts may eventually rule that Silfab has to move to a heavy industrial location away from Fort Mill, for the time being, they will be able to start manufacturing soon. Due to the very tangible risk of gas leaks, air quality issues and explosions and being within the evacuation zone, Jonathan and I have made the decision to sell our house and move somewhere at least 5-6 miles away from the evacuation zone in the next several months.
