I Feel Like I’ve Received My Life Back

Background:

“My name is Peter, and I’ve been coming to Anatara Medicine since June of 2021, about 10 months now. In 2012, I experienced a multimodal systems collapse where everything that could possibly go wrong seemed to go wrong, and yet all of my medical tests came back negative. I experienced what a lot of my fellow patients did, which is a lot of gaslighting and being told it’s all in your head and please go see a psychologist. After the required eight sessions, the psychologist said there’s nothing wrong with you mentally, you’re not depressed, and you might consider quitting your HMO, which is what I did.

After that point, I went to a series of different specialists and began to see that there were some anomalous test results, but again, I experienced just a number of wastebasket diagnoses. The kind of thing like ‘you have IBS,’ and then they say, well there’s nothing you can really do for that, or terrifying diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, which turned out not to be true.

So the question was always, well, if it’s not that, then what is it? The 32nd doctor we went to was finally the first person to say, ‘I think I know what’s going on with you’ and gave us a diagnosis of mast cell activation disorder and small intestine bacterial overgrowth, which helped me get at least a little bit out of the woods and I started to experience some recovery.

So from 2012, I was mostly housebound and sometimes bedbound. I had again a panoply of issues that meant that all I could do was my day job working from home before it was cool, and then essentially collapsing back into bed and spending every weekend resting. Dr. Lee and Dr. Herskowitz were doctors number 34 and 35, respectively. They were, through the tests that they did, the incredibly thorough intake, including genetic testing, able to identify not one but three additional issues that all of the other doctors had missed. Part of what makes their care so fantastic is knowing what to then do about it. For instance, I had often been told, ‘Your immune cell function is terrible, your NK cell count is awful,’ and that was just kind of like, well, that’s all we can tell you.

Anatara was able to say, ‘And here’s what we can do about that’. And also, in naming these other issues, they were able to say we have levers that we can pull.

So in terms of why I’m still coming, I was sharing with Dr. Lee the other day the readout from my Apple Watch Health app on my phone. What you can see is for almost these whole 10 years, an average of 700 steps a day, if that, and in the last four months, what I’ve experienced is a stair step from 3,000 steps a day, 4,000 steps a day, and then the last couple of weekends I’ve experienced 5,000 step days which is just off the charts amazing.

So I feel like I’ve received my life back. I went from on a day-to-day basis thinking I might not get out of this alive to planning actively to attend my daughter’s graduation in May.

So I couldn’t be more grateful to the entire staff here, and I just thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

– Peter