Parasites, paperwork, and surviving a personal apocalypse

I didn’t plan to get sick. No one does.

One sip of contaminated water — that’s all it took.

A tiny parasite with a big appetite for disruption slipped in unnoticed. For a while, everything seemed fine. Then my body began to unravel.

The parasite that invaded my gut was Giardia. It made itself known about two weeks after exposure—and my body made sure I knew it. I took the complete antibiotic regimen, and my gut returned to some semblance of order.

But then came the night sweats. The kind that woke me up gasping, drenched, heart pounding like I’d run a marathon in my sleep. Something was clearly wrong.

I was declared cured, but as I later came to learn from a specialist, my doctors hadn’t tested for basic markers and were premature in declaring the battle over.

Being marked “cured” felt like being erased—like the very people were ignoring my body’s protests meant to help.

Obviously, waking up in a cold sweat isn’t normal. When I finally got a gut microbiome test from a functional medicine specialist, the results were devastating.

Giardia didn’t come alone. Freeloaders had taken residence in my gut—bacteria and imbalances that had thrown everything into chaos.

I was hypoglycemic, anemic, and my cortisol production was out of sync, my body stuck in a constant state of crisis. The lab results told a grim story: my microbiome nearly annihilated, critical strains extinct, an ecosystem in collapse.

Thus began my journey of healing, with more helpful information and a small armada of caregivers, all while I attempted to keep living my life.

Despite the data, despite the mounting symptoms, I kept running into walls.

I realized then that the fight wasn’t just inside me. It was with a system that prizes quick fixes over curiosity, and metrics over meaning. Every lab test, every insurance claim, every delayed email chipped away at the fragile belief that healing was the goal.

Recovery became my full-time job. Between doctors, labs, and mounting bills, I learned to advocate for myself in a language I never wanted to speak. And yet, somewhere between the fear and fatigue, a strange calm appeared—the understanding that survival isn’t about winning. It’s about staying.

Doctors who glanced at labs and said, “You’re within range.” Specialists who narrowed the problem to a single organ and ignored the rest. Meanwhile, I was waking up drenched and dizzy, unsure if my body would hold through the day. Notes in my file made it challenging to obtain insurance coverage for medications. It was like my body’s distress signals were being lost in translation, leaving me to navigate a maze of misunderstanding.

It was gaslighting, cloaked in professionalism.

I learned that healing the body is one battle; getting a system to care is another. I realized then that the fight wasn’t just inside me. It was with a system that prizes quick fixes over curiosity, and metrics over meaning. Every lab test, every insurance claim, every delayed email chipped away at the fragile belief that healing was the goal.

I had to translate my experience into clinical terms and use specific phrases to trigger further testing. I became a reluctant student of the system—reading journal articles, cross-referencing symptoms, and learning what codes would or wouldn’t get covered by insurance.

It was exhausting.

Not just because I was sick, but because I had to prove I was ill to people who were supposed to help me heal. The burden of evidence was mine to carry, even as my body failed me. It was an exhausting, never-ending battle to make my suffering visible.

All the while, I was trying to work, to show up in leadership spaces, to “perform wellness” well enough to avoid being seen as a liability.

The system didn’t recognize what it couldn’t measure. And what it couldn’t measure, it often chose to ignore.

Eventually, I hit a wall I couldn’t push through.

I was still trying to lead, still showing up to high-stakes meetings with a half-functioning body, still drafting memos and strategy documents between medical appointments. I’d built a career on being reliable. Sharp. Steady under pressure.

But I was running on fumes—and the warning lights weren’t blinking anymore, they were blaring.

There came a day when I couldn’t fake it. My body decided for me.

I collapsed—not dramatically, not all at once—but in small, undeniable ways. I forgot names mid-sentence. I couldn’t read emails without nausea. I was crying in private, then wiping my face and logging into Zoom.

So I surrendered. I filed the paperwork. I went on medical leave.

It felt like failure at first. Like disappearing.

But in hindsight, it was the beginning of something else. A quiet act of self-respect. A necessary rebellion against a system that would have happily watched me burn out, so long as I smiled through it.

Rest, I learned, is not a reward. It’s a right.

As if my body breaking down wasn’t enough, my digital life came under attack, too.

I started noticing strange logins, password reset attempts, and suspicious pings from devices I didn’t recognize. My inbox turned into a minefield. Accounts I’d trusted for years suddenly felt unsafe.

It was terrifying—not just because of the potential damage, but because I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I was already navigating medical leave, treatments, and the sheer logistics of survival.

I changed every password. Rebuilt accounts from scratch. Anything I couldn’t secure, I shut down. I monitored login alerts like a hawk. I second-guessed every link, every email, every notification. Luckily, I was trained in this and had always done my best to be very careful with my digital life.

I was also embarrassed. An email I’d had since the commercial internet was born was no longer safe, and I had to shut it all down. I put a fraud alert on my credit reports with all three agencies after someone added a phone number to one of my medical accounts that was definitely not mine, and let the institution know in case there was further tampering.

I became hypervigilant—not just with my health, but with my identity.

It was like living with a second immune system: one for my body, one for my digital presence. And both were constantly under threat.

And then, of course, there was the money.

Healing, as it turns out, is not just physically taxing but also financially draining. The system's disbelief in my illness led to out-of-network specialists, insurance-refused lab tests, expensive supplements and prescriptions, appointment co-pays, therapy, and groceries tailored to a gut I could barely feed.

I racked up credit card debt to stay afloat. Some months, I was making impossible choices: pay rent or pay for a medical test. File an appeal or rest?

Even applying for support programs required energy I didn’t have.

Paperwork. Phone trees. AI customer reps that weren’t very helpful and insisted on trying the app or website. The endless demand to justify, explain, and document—again and again—why I needed help. It was like being lost in a bureaucratic jungle, with no clear path to safety.

There were nights I cried over a spreadsheet, trying to figure out if I could afford my rent.

I became my own case manager. My own billing department. My own advocate, trying to translate a body in crisis into the language of policy and procedure.

There were days I spent more time navigating portals and insurance appeals than I did actually healing.

Surviving was a full-time job. And it didn’t come with sick days.

And still, I’m here.

Not because the systems worked. Not because I hacked the perfect healing protocol. But because I asked for help. Despite the broken systems, people showed up with compassion and genuine care because I kept choosing to listen to my body, even when the world told me to ignore it.

This chapter has rewritten my understanding of resilience. It’s not about grit or endurance. It’s about recognizing when to stop. When to say no. When to be soft with yourself in a world that rewards performance over presence.

I don’t have a five-step plan or a triumphant return to announce. What I have is a deeper relationship with my own aliveness—and a fierce sense of what truly matters. I also have a deeper appreciation for the body and what it's capable of in the care of medical professionals who understand.

I'm not saying don’t trust medicine or science. But it’s important to trust yourself and find the right professionals for your particular challenge. Once you do land in the right place, it can make all the difference. What doesn’t heal you: doom-scrolling the worst possible outcomes without taking action to seek medical care.

If you’re in it—if your body’s in revolt, if the systems are failing you, if you’re exhausted from trying to explain yourself—I see you. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You’re navigating a world that still doesn't know how to hold pain with grace. And there are still people who do care, even if the systems feel cold sometimes.

But love—real, inconvenient, mutual love—is still the best medicine I know. It’s what kept me alive. It’s what has helped me to heal. And I will recover fully.

And slowly, I’m learning: survival isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of becoming something more true.